by Richard Ford
Vicki is staring down at her full plate, but glances up once out the tops of her eyes and gives me a disheartened sour-mouth of disgust. There is trouble, as I’ve suspected, on the horizon. I have talked too much to suit her and, worse, said the wrong things. And worse yet, jabbered on like a drunk old uncle in a voice she’s never heard, a secular Norman Vincent Pealeish tone I use for the speaker’s bureau and that even makes me squeamish sometimes when I hear it on tape. This may have amounted to a betrayal, a devalued intimacy, an illusion torn, causing doubt to bloom into dislike. Our own talk is always of the jokey-quippy-irony style and lets us leap happily over “certain things” to other “certain things”—cozy intimacy, sex and rapture, ours in a heartbeat. But now I may have stepped out of what she thinks she knows and feels safe about, and become some Gildersleeve she doesn’t know, yet instinctively distrusts. There is no betrayal like voice betrayal, I can tell you that. Women hate it. Sometimes X would hear me say something—something as innocent as saying “Wis-sconsin” when I usually said “Wisconsin”—and turn hawk-eyed with suspicion, wander around the house for twenty minutes in a brown brood. “Something you said didn’t sound like you,” she’d say after a while. “I can’t remember what it was, but it wasn’t the way you talk.” I, of course, would be stumped for what to answer, other than to say that if I said it, it must be me.
Though I should know it’s a bad idea to accompany anyone but yourself home for the holidays. Holidays with strangers never turn out right, except in remote train stations, Vermont ski lodges or the Bahamas.
“Who’ll have coffee?” Lynette says brightly. “I’ve got decaf.” She is clearing dishes smartly.
“Knicks,” Cade mutters, pounding to his feet and slumping off.
“Nix to you too, Cade,” Lynette says, pushing through the kitchen door, arms laden. She turns to frown, then cuts her eyes at Wade who is sitting with a pleasant, distracted look on his square face, palms flat on the tablecloth thinking about team concept and the grand scale of things. She widely mouths words to the effect of getting a point across to this Cade Arcenault outfit, or there’ll be hell to pay, then vanishes out the door, letting back in a new scent of strong coffee.
Wade is galvanized, and gives Vicki and me a put-on smile, rising from the head of the table, looking small and uncomfortable in the loose-fitting sports jacket and ugly tie—unquestionably a joke present from the family or the men at the toll plaza. He has worn it as a token of good spirits, but they have temporarily abandoned him. “I guess I’ve got a couple things to do,” he says miserably.
“Don’t you rough up on that boy now,” Vicki threatens in a whisper. Her eyes are savage slits. “Life ain’t peaches-and-milk for him either.”
Wade looks at me and smiles helplessly, and once again I imagine him peeping into an empty hospital room from which he’ll never return.
“Cade’s fine, sister,” he says with a smile, then wanders off to find Cade, already deep in some squarish room of his down a hallway on another level.
“It’ll be all right,” I say, soft and sober-voiced now, meant to start me back on the road to intimacy. “There’s just too many new people in Cade’s life. I wouldn’t be any good at it either.” I smile and nod in one fell motion.
Vicki raises an eyebrow—I am a strange man with inexpert opinions concerning her family life, something she needs like a new navel. She turns a dinner spoon over and over in her fingers like a rosary. The boat collar of her pink jersey has slid a fraction off-center exposing a patch of starkly white brassiere strap. It is inspiring, and I wish this were the important business we were up to instead of old dismal-serious—though I have only myself to blame. Sic transit gloria mundi. When is that ever not true?
“Your father’s a great guy,” I say, my voice becoming softer with each word. I should be silent, portray a different fellow entirely, affect some hidden antagonism of my own to balance hers. Only I’m simply not able to. “He reminds me of a great athlete. I’m sure he’ll never have a nervous breakdown.”
Lynette clatters dessert plates and coffee cups in the kitchen. She’s listening to us, and Vicki knows it. Anything said now will be for a wider consumption.
“Daddy and Cade oughta be living here by theirselves,” Vicki says scornfully. “He oughtn’t to be hooked up with this ole gal. They oughta be both big bachelors havin the time of their lives.”
“He seems pretty happy to me.”
“Don’t start on me ’bout my own daddy, if you please. I know you well enough, don’t I? I ought to know him!” Her eyes grow sparkly with dislike. “What’s all that guff you were spewin about. Patriotism. Team concept. You sounded like a preacher. I just about mortified.”
“They’re things I believe in. More people could stand to think that way, if you ask me.”
“Well, you oughta believe them to yourself quietly then. I can’t take this.”
At this moment, Elvis Presley comes to the living room door and stares up at me. He’s heard something he doesn’t like and intends to find out if I’m responsible. “I don’t even like men,” Vicki says, staring belligerently at her spoon. “Ya’ll don’t make yourselves happy ten minutes at a time. You and Everett both. Y’act like tormented dogs. Plus, you bring it all on yourselves.”
“I think it’s you that’s unhappy.”
“Yeah? But it’s really you, though, idn’t it? You hate everything.”
“I’m pretty happy.” I put on a big smile, though it’s true I am heartsick. “You make me happy. I know that. You can count on that.”
“Oh boy. Here we go. I shouldn’t of told you about your ex and whatever his name is. You been Serious Sam ever since.”
“I’m not Serious Sam. I don’t even care about that.”
“Shoot. You should’ve seen your face when I told you.”
“Look at it now, though.” My grin is ear-to-ear, though it is impossible to argue in behalf of your own good spirits without defeating them completely and getting mad as hell. Elvis Presley has seen enough and goes back behind the couch. “Why don’t we just get married?” I say. “Isn’t that a good idea?”
“Because I don’t love you enough, that’s why.” She looks away. More dishes clatter in the kitchen. Cups settle noisily into saucers. Far away, in a room I know nothing of, a phone rings softly.
“Now that’s the phone,” I hear Lynette say to no one in particular, and the ringing stops.
“Yes you do,” I say brightly. “That’s just a bunch of hooey. I’ll get right down on my knees right now.” I get onto my knees and walk on them all the way around the table to where she sits, thighs crossed regally and entombed in taut panty hose. “A man’s on his knees to plead and beg with you to marry him. He’d be faithful, and take out the garbage and do dishes and cook, or at least pay someone to do it. How can you say no?”
“It ain’t gon be hard,” she says giggling, embarrassed at me for yet another reason.
“Frank?”
My name. Unexpected. Called from somewhere in the unexplored cave of the house. Wade’s voice. Probably he and Cade want me up there to watch the end of the Knicks game—once again everything decided in the last twenty seconds. But wild horses couldn’t pull me away from here. This is serious.
“Ho, Wade,” I call out, still on my knees in my pleader’s pose in front of his regal daughter. One more bout of ardent pleading-tickling and we’ll both be laughing, and she’ll be mine. And why shouldn’t she? My always needn’t be forever. I’m ready for the plunge, nervy as a cliff-diver. Though if down the line things go rotten we can both climb the cliffs again. Life is long.
“Phone’s for you,” Wade calls. “You can take it up here in Lynette’s and my room.” Wade sounds sobered and bedeviled, a pitiable presence from the top of the stairs. A door clicks softly shut.
“Who’s that?” Vicki says scratchily, tugging on her pink skirt as if we’d been caught in heavy petting. Her brassiere strap is now exposed
completely.
“I don’t know.” Though I have a terrible bone-aching crisis fear that I have forgotten something important and am about to stare disaster in the face. A special assignment I was supposed to write but have somehow completely neglected, everyone up in New York rushing round in emergency moods trying to find me. Or possibly an Easter date I made months ago and have overlooked, though there’s no one I know well enough to ask me. I cannot guess who it is. I plant a quick kiss of promised return on Vicki’s stockinged knee, get to my feet and head off to investigate. “Don’t move,” I say. The kitchen door is just opening as I leave.
Above floors, a dark and short carpeted hall leads to a bathroom at the end where a light is on. Two doors are shut on one side, but on the other, one stands open, a bluish light shining through. Ahead of me I hear a thermostat click and the sound of whooshing air.
I step into Wade and Lynette’s nuptial sanctum where the blue light radiates from a bed lamp. The bed is also blue, a skirted-and-flounced four-poster canopy, king-sized and wide as a peaceful lake. Nothing is an inch out of place. Rugs raked. Vanity sparkling. No underwear or socks piled on the blue Ultrasuede loveseat beside the window overlooking the windy boat channel. The door to the bathroom is discreetly closed. A smell of face powder lingers. The room is perfect as a place where strangers can accept personal phone calls.
The phone is on the bed table, its conscientious little night light glowing dimly.
“Hello,” I say, with no idea what I will hear, and sink expectant into the soft flounced silence.
“Frank?” X’s voice, solemn, reliable, sociable. I am instantly exhilarated to hear her. But there is an undertone I do not comprehend. Something beyond speech, which is why she is the only one who can call me.
I feel a freeze going right to the bottom of my feet. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s all right,” she says. “Everyone’s all right. Everyone’s fine here. Well, everyone’s not, actually. Someone named, let’s see, Walter Luckett is dead, apparently. I guess I don’t know him. He sounds familiar, but I don’t know why. Who is he?”
“What do you mean, he’s dead?” Consolation spurts right back up through me. “I was with him last night. At home. He isn’t dead.”
She sighs into the receiver, and a dumb silence opens on the line. I hear Wade Arcenault’s voice, soft and evocative, speaking to his son across the hall behind a closed door. A television mumbles in the background, a low crowd noise and a ref’s distant whistle. “Now in the best of all possible worlds….” Wade can be heard to say.
“Well,” X says quietly, “the police called here about thirty minutes ago. They think he’s dead. There’s a letter. He left it for you.”
“What do you mean?” I say, and am bewildered. “You sound like he killed himself.”
“He shot himself, the policeman said, with a duck gun.”
“Oh no.”
“His wife’s out of town, evidently.”
“She’s in Bimini with Eddie Pitcock.”
“Hmm,” X says. “Well.”
“Well what?”
“Nothing. I’m sorry to call you. I just listened to your message.”
“Where’re the children?”
“They’re here. They’re worried, but it isn’t your fault. Clary answered the phone when the police called. Are you with what’s-her-face?” (A first-rate Michigan expression of practiced indifference.)
“Vicki.” Vicki Whatsherface.
“Just wondering.”
“Walter came to the house last night and stayed late.”
“Well,” X says, “I’m sorry. Was he a friend of yours, then?”
“I guess so.” Somebody in Cade’s room claps his hands loudly three times in succession, then whistles.
“Are you all right, Frank?”
“I’m shocked.” In fact, I can feel my fingertips turning cold. I lie down backwards on the silky bedspread.
“The police want you to call them.”
“Where was he?”
“Two blocks from here. At 118 Coolidge. I may have even heard the shot. It isn’t that far.”
I stare up through the open canopy into an absolutely blue ceiling. “What am I supposed to do? Did you already say that?”
“Call a Sergeant Benivalle. Are you all right? Would you like me to come meet you someplace?”
Cade lets out a loud, raucous laugh across the hall.
“Isn’t that the goddamn truth!” Wade says in high spirits. “It is the god-damndest thing, I swear.”
“I’d like you to meet me someplace,” I say in a whisper. “I’ll have to call you, though.”
“Where in the world are you?” (This, in her old scolding lover’s style of talk: ‘Where will you turn up next?’ ‘Where in the world have you been?’)
“Barnegat Pines,” I say softly.
“Wherever that is.”
“Can I call you?”
“You can come over here if you want to. Of course.”
“I’ll call soon as I know what to do.” I have no idea why I should be whispering.
“Call the police, all right?”
“All right.”
“I know it’s not a happy call.”
“It’s hard to think about right now. Poor Walter.” In the pale blue ceiling I wish I could see something I recognized. Almost anything would do.
“Call me when you get here, Frank.”
Though of course there is nothing to see above me. “I will,” I say. X hangs up without saying anything, as if “Frank” were the same as saying “Goodbye. I love you.”
I call information for the Haddam police and dial it immediately. As I wait I try to remember if I’ve ever laid eyes on Sergeant Benivalle, though there’s no doubt I have. I’ve seen the whole guinea lot of them at Village Hall. In the normal carryings-on of life they are unavoidable and familiar as luggage.
“Mr. Bascombe,” a voice says carefully. “Is that right?”
“Yes.”
I recognize him straight off—a big chesty, small-eyed detective with terrible acne scars and a flat-top. He is a man with soft thick hands he used, in fact, to take my fingerprints when our house was broken into. I remember their softness from years ago. He is a good guy by my memory, though I know he’d never remember me.
And in fact Sergeant Benivalle might as well be talking to a recording. Death and survivorship have become the equivalents of pianos to a house-mover—big items, but a day’s work that will end.
He explains in a voice void of interest that he would like me to offer positive identification of “the deceased.” No one nearby will, and I reluctantly agree to. Yolanda is unreachable in Bimini, though he seems not to be bothered by it. He says he will have to give me a Thermofax of Walter’s letter, since he needs it to keep “for evidence.” Since Walter left another note for the police, there is no suspicion of foul play. Walter killed himself, he says, by blowing his brains out with a duck gun, and the time of death was about one P.M. (I was playing croquet on the lawn.) He bolted the shotgun, Sergeant Benivalle says, to the top of the television set and rigged a remote controi to release the trigger. The TV was on when people arrived—the Knicks and Cavaliers from Richfield.
“Now, Mr. Bascombe,” the Sergeant says, using his private, off-duty voice. I hear him riffling through papers, blowing smoke into the receiver. He is sitting, I know, at a metal desk, his mind wandering past other crimes, other events of more concern. It is Easter there, too, after all. “Can I ask you something personal?”
“What?”
“Well.” Papers riffle, a metal drawer closes. “Were you and this Mr. Luckett, uh, sorta into it?”
“Do you mean did we have an argument, no.”
“I don’t, uhm, mean an argument. I mean, were you romantically linked. It would help to know that.”
“Why would it help you to know that?”
Sergeant Benivalle sighs, hi
s chair squeaks. He blows smoke into the receiver again. “Just to account for the, uh, event in question here. No big deal. You of course don’t have to answer.”
“No,” I say. “We were just friends. We belonged to a divorced men’s club together. This seems like an intrusion to me.”
“I’m sort of in the intrusion business down here, Mr. Bascombe.” Drawers open and close.
“All right. I just don’t exactly see why that has to be an issue.”
“It’s okay, thanks,” Sergeant Benivalle says wearily (I’m not sure what he means by this either). “If I’m not here, ask for the copy with the watch officer. Tell ’em who you are so you can, ah, identify the deceased. All right?” His voice has suddenly brightened for no reason.
“I’ll do that,” I say irritably.
“Thanks,” Sergeant Benivalle says. “Have a good day.”
I hang up the phone.
Though it is not a good day, nor is it going to be. Easter has turned to rain and bickering and death. There’s no saving it now.
“Whaaaat?” Vicki shouts, all shock and surprise at the death of someone she has never met, her face creased into a look of pain and uninterested disbelief.
“Why, oouu noouu,” Lynette exclaims, making the sign of the cross twice and in a devil’s own hurry, without leaving the kitchen door. “Poor man. Poor man.”
I’ve told them only that a friend of mine is dead and I have to go back right away. Dutch Babies and piping hot coffee sit all around, though Wade and Cade are still upstairs ironing things out.
“Well course you do,” Lynette says sympathetically. “You better go on right now.”
“Dyouwanme to go with you?” For some reason Vicki grins at this idea.