Love Among the Ruins

by Robert Clark

  Edward telephoned the police station, was put on hold, and finally was transferred to a voice that announced itself as Lieutenant O’Connor. Edward described how matters now stood.

  “So she—they—should have been home when?” this O’Connor asked.

  “Maybe by eleven. Last night.”

  “So they haven’t been missing too long.”

  “Long enough that we’re sick with—that we’re very concerned.”

  “You see, the thing is, Mr. Lowry—”

  “Byrne. The boy’s name is Lowry. The boy’s mother is Mrs. Lowry. There’s no father. Well, there is, but . . .”

  “Fine, fine, Mr. Byrne. The thing is, it hasn’t even been twelve hours. I can’t even take a missing-person report for twenty-four.”

  “What can you do? Now?” Edward said. He was beginning to fray already. The cup of coffee Virginia had set before him was cold.

  “I can tell you to stay calm and not to worry too much. Most of the time, they turn up within a day. That’s why we wait. If we didn’t, we’d be processing false alarms right and left.”

  “You think they’ll ‘turn up’? That’s swell,” Edward said. Virginia had come over next to him, trying to listen to what the cop was saying, her hand heavy on his shoulder. “You think my daughter’s a stray cat that just wandered off or something?”

  “I don’t think anything of the kind, Mr. Byrne.”

  “Sorry. But, hell, I mean, suppose something’s happened to them. Is happening to them. Now. You don’t worry about that until the clock strikes eleven or twelve or whatever?”

  “If anything happened like what you’re thinking we’d probably already know about it. Accidents, emergency rooms, we get all those reports. We’d know.”

  “So you think we should just relax and wait. When two perfectly reliable, dependable kids just disappear like this?”

  “People don’t disappear. They go somewhere, but you and I don’t know where. Especially teenagers. And especially at the fair. We get maybe double these sorts of calls during the fair. There’s ten thousand other kids there and they meet each other and off they go. Turn up the next day or so saying, ‘Oh gee, I didn’t know what time it was.’ That’s just what they’re like. I don’t have to tell you that.”

  “I suppose not,” Edward said. He could see no profit in pressing the point that this was not what his daughter was “like.” “So what’s next? We wait until eleven-oh-one tonight and then I call you back?”

  “I won’t be here that late. But you can come in and file a report at the desk—”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake—”

  “Look. I’m sorry. I know this is very . . . frustrating. Tell you what. If they’re not back this afternoon, you come down around three, before I go home, and we’ll do it then. Okay?”

  “All right.”

  “See, chances are they’ll be back and we’ll never have to bother. But there you go, okay?”

  “Sure. That’s in the Public Safety Building, right?”

  “Second floor. Room 217. Now this Mrs. Lowry will need to file her own report for her son.”

  “But you’ll extend this . . . courtesy to her as well? She can come too?”

  “Sure. No problem. Makes sense to do them together.”

  “Good. Well, thanks. And we’ll see you—”

  “If you need to. Probably won’t.”

  “Okay. Goodbye,” Edward said. He hung up the phone, and looked at his wife. He had not looked at her, it seemed, since the night before, since before all this had begun. Other than being a little colorless and a little drawn, she looked like herself, but then he saw that her pallor was less a color overlying her skin than a transparency through which another face was visible, and it was an ancient face, the face perhaps of Virginia’s mother, or some other long-dead person in her lineage. It was not, in any case, his wife, or so it seemed to him, even as he held her and explained the parts of his conversation with the police lieutenant that she had missed. For the rest of the day, as they waited, he did not really look at her again—although he said soothing things to her and squeezed her hand—for fear she might shatter, might flare and turn to cinders before his eyes.

  Edward had called Jane a little before eight o’clock and explained what could and could not be done as regarded the police. Then, at an hour which would normally find her scarcely beginning to stir, she realized she had the whole day before her. Now she might have taken Lieutenant O’Connor’s advice (as relayed by Edward) not to worry, but this was of course no more practicable than not breathing, and in fact every other possibility besides worrying was severely circumscribed: She could not go out, for fear that Billy would then come home while she was gone; and she also could not go out because he or Edward or somebody might telephone; and she could not use the telephone herself for fear of tying up the line when Billy or Edward or somebody was trying to get through. She could, she supposed, ask to use a neighbor’s phone, but that would be to risk missing the phone ringing here.

  It is bad enough that worry induces a sense of paralysis, and worse when it imposes paralysis as a duty, as the best solution to the problem from which it has arisen. The world, of course, is deeply contingent, and we are doubtless fools to believe we are ever free from its accidents or the purposes and deeds of others. But we enjoy the illusion—or the promise, for those inclined to belief—that we can act a little in our lives and the lives of our fellows, and not always for the worse. Perhaps that is why worry leads so easily to despair, to existential doubt and disbelief, for we can do nothing good under its aspect but wait, and it is a passive, virtueless kind of waiting, a kind of timorous staying out of the way, standing atop a chair while the mouse of chance runs amok round the kitchen floor.

  It took Jane the better part of an hour to devise a strategy whereby she might contact the outside world, or in particular her friend Frances, whose ear, she realized, she desperately needed; whose counsel, however self-regarding and jaded, would be a welcome alternative to the buzzing of the worry swarming around her. The strategy consisted of being rude, or at least abrupt, of abandoning every shred of telephonic finesse to deal with the emergency at hand. So it was that Jane dialed Frances’s house and when the phone was answered, she more or less bellowed rapid-fire, “It’s Jane. Billy’s disappeared. Please come over right now. Can’t talk. Don’t call back.”

  Counting the rings, Jane figured it took all of ten seconds. She slammed the receiver back down into the cradle and kept her hand on it, holding it down for fear it might somehow levitate off by itself and render the line busy. Then she caught her breath, and making sure the phone was secure, she sat and waited, she hoped, for Frances to come, and tried not to think overmuch on the probability that the someone might have tried to call during those ten seconds, the ten she had willfully stolen from worry, and perhaps, if she was unlucky, from William’s life entire.

  Frances arrived twenty-five minutes later and burst into the apartment, breathless, as though both it and she were in flames. “What the hell is going on, Jane?” she said, and then, rather than let Jane answer too hastily, repeated herself. “What the hell is going on?”

  “Billy’s gone. He went to the State Fair with his girlfriend yesterday morning and they should have been home by eleven or twelve. But they never came back.”

  “So did you call the police?”

  “Ted—the girl’s father—did. We’re going to go down and file a missing-person report if they’re not back this afternoon.”

  Frances moved toward Jane and put her left arm around her and pulled her close, hugging her. “Poor baby,” she said. “Poor baby.” She stepped back and looked at Jane from head to foot, appraised her as though William might be hidden somewhere on her person. Then she said, “So do they think anything . . . untoward might have happened?”

  “They think nothing happened—that they just wandered off the way kids will, and that they’ll come home sooner or later.”

  “And what do you
think?”

  “I suppose they’re right. He’s not the Lindbergh baby, is he? And there haven’t been any reports of accidents or . . . violence and so forth.”

  “But . . . ”

  “But this isn’t like him, is it? They say this happens all the time, particularly at the fair. That some kids meet some other kids and go off. But Billy’s not the kind to do that, is he? He’s not very . . . social. So why would he go off with anybody? And he’s very reliable, except when he forgets things.”

  “He’s a sweet kid.”

  “So it’s not like he’s going to just forget to come home.”

  “What about the girl? Maybe she’s the reason.”

  “Oh, she seems very normal. Quiet. Small. Girlish-looking. Irish Catholic family. The father’s in pharmaceuticals. The mother does Junior Leaguey things—however Catholics do them. Virginia’s her name.”

  “And she’s . . . virginal?”

  “She’s not, not really. Maybe a little reserved. And he’s very nice. He called the police. He’s going to take me down to the station. If we have to go.”

  “So was Billy very involved with this girl?”

  “I think so. You never know.” Jane paused. “I mean, they don’t say, do they? But they’re always together, at least since June.” Jane gestured down the hall. “Why don’t we go in the kitchen? We’ll have coffee.”

  Jane stopped in the kitchen doorway. “I think he wrote her love letters. I think maybe she wrote poems for him,” she said, and then moved to the counter, to the percolator. “That’s awfully sweet, isn’t it?”

  “So maybe they eloped.”

  “Nobody elopes anymore.”

  “I did. Once. To Iowa. With Jimmy McGowan.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “It was fun. Maybe it’s still fun. Shame about Jimmy. Dull man.”

  They sat down at Jane’s table and drank coffee and continued to talk in this way, elliptically, moving away from the matter of William for a time, and then returning to it. This gave Jane some ease, worrying openly for a minute or two, then taking shelter in familiar topics—politics, people they had gone to school with, men about whom Frances held opinions or with whom she had had experience—before coming back to worry. She attained a little more ease when, around eleven-thirty, she and Frances were simultaneously struck by the notion that, under the circumstances (and given the ascendant heat), a round of gin and tonic would be in order. And at twelve-thirty, Jane made egg salad sandwiches, and for the first time in twelve hours she felt optimism.

  After a second round of drinks, Frances slipped away to visit her office and Jane made the bed and did the dishes. She did not make William’s bed or even enter his room. She had begun to sense how far she might push herself, to what extent she might permit reality or active speculation about it to trespass in the precincts of her heart; how much the few strands of peace she had painstakingly woolgathered in the last few hours might withstand.

  At two, Frances returned. At two-thirty the phone rang. It was Edward, saying they would be by in twenty minutes to pick her up to go see Lieutenant O’Connor. Jane excused herself for a few minutes to prepare for this; to put on a sober lightweight dress and to fix her hair and makeup. It was as though she was at last embarking upon the occasion this whole day had been planned to culminate in all along—a wedding or a funeral or a graduation ceremony.

  She smoothed her dress, and asked Frances to check her. She was fine, Frances said—“They’ll probably put you in the lineup”—and, yes, Frances would stay here in the apartment, for the sake of the phone, just in case.

  It is no slight thing, the facts parents know about their children, without even knowing that they know them. Answering the policeman’s queries, Jane found that she could say without hesitation that Billy was five-eleven and weighed 160 pounds, even though she had some years ago given up attending the physical examinations where these statistics might be obtained. He had been born April 1, 1951 (always amusing, that one), and had brown eyes and brown hair. Jane could have easily recited his birth weight, the duration of her labor, and the blend of analgesics that had rendered her semisensate from the waist down, if the lieutenant had so desired. She could have told him things William himself did not know or had forgotten: His first word (“Da”); his shoe sizes at various points in his toddlerdom; the name (Ollie) of his favorite stuffed animal until he was five; his IQ (130) on the Stanford-Binet scale.

  In turn, Jane learned that the Byrnes’ daughter’s full name was Emily Elizabeth; that she was born almost exactly a year after William on March 25, 1952, in exactly the same hospital; that she was five-four and about 110 pounds and had light blue eyes and auburn hair, although Jane noticed that the lieutenant translated this to “lt. br.” on his form. And of course, Virginia could have given him all the same supplementary information about Emily that Jane possessed in regard to her son and then some: that Emily’s baby-sitter when she was an infant was named Mrs. Kane (and that Mr. Kane had a drinking problem); that her confirmation name was Mary Agnes; that she had wanted to become a nun when she was seven and a geologist when she was eleven; that her menses had begun a few weeks after her thirteenth birthday; and that she adored her father and definitively preferred him to her mother, which was a little sad, but completely understandable in a girl of Emily’s temperament.

  After both questionnaires had been completed and the lieutenant had laid down his pencil, Edward said, “So now what?”

  “Now,” Lieutenant O’Connor began, “these get typed up and duplicated and you bring me a nice clear picture—like a school photo—and the whole package goes all around the department here and to all the sheriffs in the five-state area.”

  “And then they start looking?”

  “Well, looking, maybe. Searching, not exactly. To be honest.”

  “I’m not following you,” Edward said.

  “Well, they probably get ten or twenty packages like this a week. We get more, being a metropolitan force. So, no, you can’t go search—go actively looking—for all these kids, all these people. You just couldn’t do it all.”

  “So what do all these sheriffs and cops do?”

  “They’re made aware of the matter. It goes into the files. So if they see something, notice something—kids who don’t seem to belong locally—maybe they put two and two together.”

  “Maybe,” Edward said. “But you, the police here, you search, you investigate, right?”

  “We make an alert. Everybody knows. But, no,” the lieutenant said, “we don’t mount a search, do an investigation.”

  “You don’t?” Virginia said.

  “Well, what do you do? Just exactly?” Edward asked.

  “I’m sure—” Jane found herself interjecting to no purpose; Jane, to whom the police, at least in theory, were but a precursor to some future gestapo.

  Lieutenant O’Connor put his hands together on top of his desk and spoke slowly. “There hasn’t been a crime. No abduction. No foul play. No law broken. They’re not even truant, because they’re both over sixteen.”

  “School starts tomorrow,” Virginia offered, inanely, Jane thought. Then Jane reconsidered. It was the kind of thing one said to fill empty spaces, to keep the madness at bay while the moment passed, the madness Jane had to admit she was already up to her boottops in.

  “So, really, you don’t do anything,” Edward was saying. “Strictly speaking.” Edward—this Ted—Jane thought, sounded nobly prosecutorial, like Welch facing down Joe McCarthy. She was not sure what this might accomplish, but it heartened her.

  “I wouldn’t say that. Within our . . . brief, we do everything we can. But until there’s evidence of a crime, we can—”

  “So if Emily turns up in a ditch somewhere, you guys will get to work,” Edward said. “That’s really swell. Gives me every confidence.”

  “That’s really not fair. Or how it works. We have a framework. From the city, the state, the district attorney, and that is where we have
to be.” Lieutenant O’Connor shifted his eyes from Edward to Jane, detecting in her a perhaps more willing interlocutor. “Now really, as far as investigation goes—figuring out what they might have done, where they might be—you people are actually better equipped than any cop. You know these kids, their friends, their associates, their interests, their habits. Right?”

  “I suppose,” Jane said. Edward was looking away, his hands knotted together. Virginia watched the lieutenant talk to Jane, whose eyes were riveted upon him.

  “So first thing, what all of you do”—Lieutenant O’Connor looked over to Edward—“is call all their friends, ask questions. Then go through their rooms, their stuff. They’re careless, even when they’re trying to be secretive. So chances are there’s something that will point you in the direction they went.”

  “So we get to sleuth this thing out while you—” Edward put in.

  “Hush,” Virginia said. “Let him finish.”

  “Then we have something to go on. For example, maybe they planned to go to San Francisco, so we can put a query in to the police there—something substantial, that they can maybe look into.”

  “Maybe look into. Swell,” Edward said.

  “So you’re saying you think they ran away?” Virginia asked.

  “I’m not thinking or saying anything. But it’s an obvious possibility. And San Francisco, California in general, is where they all go these days. And the boy’s father lives there, right?”

  “Yes,” said Jane. “But it’s scarcely likely he’d go to him. The man doesn’t take any interest—”

  “Still, you have to consider these things. That’s how it works. Little fact here, little fact there. See what you find. Then come back and see me.”

  Edward said, “So that’s it. That’s what you have to offer?”

  The lieutenant nodded. “For right now, yes.”

  Edward stood, taking Virginia’s elbow as he did, and she rose with him. He said, “Well, thank you. This is all very . . . helpful.” Then the two of them moved out into the hall, and the lieutenant watched them speak briefly in whispers, the wife, he figured, chewing out the husband for being sarcastic.