Vigil for a Stranger

by Kitty Burns Florey

  I wasn’t sure I did. I went to Jamesville High and spent three months in a psychiatric ward making baskets.

  I didn’t tell her that, though our conversation quickly got to the point where we could confess anything to each other. She told me about her parents’ noisy drunken cocktail parties when she used to sit weeping in terror in the kitchen with the maid; I told her that I always hated the way my parents were with the motel guests (my mother so servile, my father so brusque); we talked about our hair; I told her some things about Emile, and about Denis and Yale; she told me the trouble she’d had getting over her abortion; I told her about George Drescher’s gallery; she told me about going to Argentina to design a system for the largest beef cattle ranch in the world; I told her about Jimmy Luigi’s; she told me about her sister who got a tattoo of a naked man on her left bicep; I asked her about Roger; she asked me about being a clam-eating vegetarian.

  We went on and on: we were becoming friends, and our conversation quickened with the consciousness of that fact. I felt the afternoon getting away from me while I galloped into a closeness to Alison that I wasn’t prepared for; I could sense that I was on the verge of revealing things I didn’t really want to say to anyone. I could understand why Orin told her so much about us: she was impossible to resist.

  This was something that happened to me more often with women than with men, though it was what drew James and me together: the immediate, unmistakable sense of rightness, of comfort and trust. Talking to Alison, I thought of the way that block on Chapel Street between Jimmy Luigi’s and Claire’s would always bear the light of James’s first goodness to me, the winter day he volunteered Rosie and Ruby and then took me out for herb tea and coffee cake.

  I had missed that intimacy. James and I had lost it, and I didn’t have it with Orin—not like this, not so purely. We were happy in each other’s company; he was gregarious and entertaining, and he listened to whatever I wanted to tell him. But I was aware that we didn’t always get through to each other, that sometimes I couldn’t judge his reactions to my words, that he seemed to be withholding things from me. There were times when I knew things he never would, or when he seemed urgently attuned to what eluded me completely. These small lapses were, in a way, the aspects of Orin that recalled Pierce to me most vividly—the failures to connect, the momentary lack of symmetry, the tiny instances of frustration. None of this had anything to do with love, and certainly not with passion. Pierce and I had been best friends; and in bed, Orin and I understood each other perfectly.

  Alison polished off her shrimp, ate all the bread and butter, and helped me finish my vol-au-vent with spring vegetables. She told me about her new apartment and the reproduction William Morris wallpaper she had chosen for the dining room. We found that we shared a taste for the most extreme examples of Victorian furniture, and she wanted to know all the details about the auction where James and I found the flamboyant mahogany commode. She also liked Stickley, and she was interested in early twentieth century oak, the good stuff, and she wanted to hear all about my watercolors, she’d love a water-color for her dining room, something strong that wouldn’t be overpowered by all the pattern.

  When I looked at my watch, I saw that we had been at lunch for nearly two hours. What happened to the busy yuppie who thrived on hard work? How long could a long lunch hour be? Didn’t she say she had appointments? And wasn’t I going to go to the Whitney?

  As if she had read my mind, Alison said, “I hope you’re not in any particular hurry. I don’t have an appointment until four, and then I’m flying to D.C. on the red-eye. I just finished a huge, complicated, pricey and extremely boring job.” She grinned—proud of herself and trying not to show it. “So I told myself I’m just going to chill out for a day—you know? Spend some time away from those bloody machines!”

  The restaurant had emptied out, our table by the window was a little oasis of clanking silverware. The waiter was hovering, he wanted us to leave, but we ordered more coffee, and Alison insisted that we have dessert. I gave the waiter a sheepish smile, but Alison said, “Frank, you don’t mind if we stay, do you? Can you keep pouring coffee into us for a while?” Frank agreed, of course; he seemed delighted, whether he was or not. This was a way of life I didn’t yet understand: the unapologetic life, the life of privilege, the life in which friendship, talk, intimacy—pleasure—were more important than the convenience of some waiter—the life led by the glamorous people who besieged Orin when I wasn’t around.

  “Isn’t this wonderful?” Alison grinned at me. She didn’t look glamorous. Her lipstick was gone, her upper lip was greasy, she had had too much wine. But somehow she managed to continue to look like what she was: a busy professional woman, one of the best in her field. “Aren’t we having fun?” she asked me. “I’m awfully glad I took the plunge and called you.”

  “I thought you wanted to sell me something,” I confessed. “I had no idea what Haver & Schmidt was.”

  She got the giggles at this, and imagined designing a system for what she called the watercolor biz. But in spite of my liking for Alison, in spite of our instant rapport, I kept wondering why she did, in fact, telephone me and invite me to lunch.

  And then, over our second coffees, the conversation turned to Orin. She and Orin had been friends for ages, Alison said—when pressed, she guessed about five years. She met him through Roger, before she and Roger got engaged, when Roger was involved with a friend of hers. Orin and Roger did a lot of work together—Roger was in real estate law as well as taxes—and when she set up the new installations for Parker Properties she worked pretty closely with Orin and really got to know him.

  “But it’s your friend Pierce who interests me,” Alison said. “Orin is such a mystery man. The Scarlet Pimpernel. It really intrigues me that you thought he might be someone else.” She looked at me brightly. “You know?”

  “It was just a crazy idea of mine,” I said.

  She looked disappointed. “You don’t think so anymore?”

  “It’s too impossible.”

  Alison toyed with her spoon. She peered at her face in it, frowning. “Well, I don’t see how you can just give up on it,” she said. “It does have a certain plausibility.” She put down the spoon and looked at me. “I mean, he really could be this guy Pierce,” she said. “Orin. He could be the guy you lost twenty years ago, Christine. The guy you thought was dead. Couldn’t he?”

  I was unable to respond. We sat there looking at each other, and then I dropped my eyes to my plate and squeezed my hands together in my lap. It had been starting to be over, and now it was beginning again, and I thought to myself: of course. This is not crazy. It makes the most perfect sense, as if I have been working at cleaning an old canvas, delicately removing layers of paint to expose different realities until I reach, finally, not the blank white canvas I thought was the end but something below even that, something infinitely richer than I could have anticipated.

  What was crazy was not to trust my instincts. The moment I saw him, I thought: Pierce. Yes. Of course. And then I drove it away, I had been doing what I could to drive it away ever since.

  The old longing returned: for Pierce, my Pierce, who played the guitar and sang the blues, who bought me a wind-up penguin and quoted from Van Gogh’s letters—my dearest friend, whom I would miss until I died.

  I raised my eyes at last and looked at Alison. She had been finishing her pastry, an apricot tarte, snatching the food off her fork with quick little bites, watching me across the table while I struggled with what she said. “I hope I didn’t open some can of worms that’s none of my business,” she said. “Sometimes I get carried away.”

  She looked somehow voracious, but her voice was kind, and she seemed genuinely concerned. I wondered if she was the sort of person who fed on other people’s lives because her own was unsatisfactory. I wondered briefly about Roger, her fiancé—the tax and real estate lawyer who spent years traveling in India, toyed with the idea of entering a monastery, and now was a
workaholic obsessed with being made partner in the firm where he worked. Roger had to sleep with a night light, Alison told me.

  “Christine?” She pushed away her plate and reached across the table briefly to touch my arm, a gesture that reminded me of Orin. “Should I apologize? I do apologize. Okay?”

  I shook my head. “I just—I thought I’d finally settled all this in my mind, I thought I had gotten to the point—slowly, and with great difficulty gotten to the point where I had eliminated Pierce, all that madness, and it was just Orin, it was just having an affair with someone. I thought that was complicated enough.”

  “Oh God.” Her eyes blazed with sympathy. “I really don’t want to upset you. I don’t have anything to go on, it’s just a feeling I had the whole time I was talking to Orin, when he was telling me about this—that there could be something else behind everything he was saying. You know what I mean?” She signaled to Frank for more coffee. “And, of course, you know that Orin used to be an actor.”

  My heart gave a lurch. “He never told me that.” I remembered, though, what she said to me on the phone that day: he’s a real con man, her voice full of laughter.

  “Now that is really odd,” Alison said, leaning forward, nodding her head, tapping the table in front of her with one finger, as if that was where the oddness lay. “Because he was quite good, and he was fairly well known in St. Louis. There’s a little repertory theater there. He was one of their shining lights.”

  “You mean he was a professional?” I was amazed, and then I wasn’t. Since the moment I met him, I had thought of him as an actor—a natural actor, a mimic, all part of his personality, his ability to entertain. A real con man. Something else behind everything he’s saying. “I can’t believe he wouldn’t tell me that.”

  Frank approached and poured coffee. Alison turned her head and smiled vaguely in his direction but kept her sympathetic eyes on my face. “It is a bit weird,” she said.

  “Unless Orin Pierce is indeed Orin Pierce.” I spoke the words reluctantly, wearily. Suddenly what I wanted to do was take a cab over to Silvie’s, borrow her guest room and go to sleep.

  “And he’s been in hiding all these years?” asked Alison. “But hiding from what? And why emerge now? How can you be in hiding and be a professional actor at the same time? And who died in New Mexico? And if you hadn’t found him, would he have found you?” She dumped sugar into her coffee and said, “Actually, the Pierce story answers a lot of questions I’ve always had about Orin. He’s a very elusive guy—have you noticed that? What do you know about his past? And Roger agrees with me. If Orin doesn’t want you to know something, you damn well don’t know it. Am I right?”

  She was right. And yet he was always trying to get me to check his background, send for his birth certificate, meet his old friends. I told this to Alison and she dismissed it. “He could easily have certain things programmed and ready to go. An old lady down in Florida, various forged papers—who knows? Actor pals. What I’d do if I were you is check something he can’t fix, some detail that’s official—I don’t know—school records or something. One of these things he keeps daring you to check. Take him up on it. It’s worth a try—you might learn something interesting.”

  She had that Nancy Drew look in her eyes—the voraciousness I’d seen before. She was beginning to irritate me. I started to say something, but she forged ahead. “The question we keep coming back to is why?” She shrugged. “It could be a lot of things. Maybe he murdered someone. Or drove someone to his death.”

  I was suddenly cold: a chill fell over our table, our coffee cups, the silver pitcher of cream and the remains of dessert. Orin had said exactly those words once—or nearly. In the Metro that first day? Yes—and then we had talked about movies, what would happen if this were a movie. I forced myself to pick up my water glass and drink from it. My hand didn’t tremble. And yet the movie had become Gaslight—Alison and Orin combining to drive me crazy.

  I knew, of course, that this explanation was as far-fetched as any of them, I had read enough murder mysteries to understand the importance of motive. Sheer malice wasn’t enough, or the pleasures of torture for its own sake. Money had to be involved, or love, or revenge, or madness. None of these seemed to provide a coherent explanation.

  Alison was staring into her coffee cup with frowning concentration. “Or maybe he just wanted to shake off his old life and come out of hiding—start over. Like what’s-her-name, the Weatherwoman.”

  “Why did you say that?” I asked her suddenly. “About driving someone to his death?” I didn’t wait for an answer. Unable to stop myself, I went on. “Because for years I blamed Pierce for my brother’s suicide.”

  Alison looked confused, and I realized that during our long conversation I had barely mentioned Robbie’s name. “My brother Robbie shot himself with Pierce’s gun. He was twenty years old. This was after Pierce was dead, but I used to be afraid Pierce had something to do with it. I worried about it for years.”

  My head was beginning to ache: too much wine, too much food, too much late-afternoon sunlight glaring in at our table by the window. Too much thinking about the unthinkable in its various guises. I hereby exonerate Pierce from any and all wrongdoing: I could hear Robbie saying those words, I could see the shadows move across his face until he disappeared back into them. I could hear myself screaming until Emile came.

  “I don’t mean that it’s something we need to talk about,” I told Alison. My voice was strained and breathless. The headache escalated. “It was just what you said—about someone being driven to his death—I wondered if it really meant anything or if you were just—” I made a vague gesture. “Just nattering on. Just playing Miss Marple.”

  She was shocked. She said, “God, Chris, I certainly didn’t mean that, I didn’t mean anything at all, it was movie talk, I don’t think there’s anything sinister going on.”

  “Orin suggested that same thing. That Pierce murdered someone, or—” I kept getting confused. Did Orin really say this? Because if Pierce was alive Orin was talking about himself: every speculation about Pierce could be a truth. “You see—”

  I stopped again. What exactly did I want to say? Whatever had been lurking beneath it all since the moment Alison sat down next to me on the train. This was suddenly clear to me. “If Orin is really Pierce, if Pierce has been alive all these years, then it’s horrible, it’s evil, it’s—I mean the deception, the betrayal of so much.” What I was really thinking of was Robbie, but I didn’t want to talk about Robbie anymore. I went on. “Even the idea that someone could change so much, or that you don’t really know someone who’s close to you.”

  Alison nodded. “It’s scary.”

  There was a silence. I saw Orin again in his office: the White Rabbit, the balding man in the three-piece suit polishing his spectacles. Could Pierce really have come to this? I said, “But if he’s not Pierce, then nothing in the world makes any sense.” The words shocked me even as I spoke them: I hadn’t known I believed this, that my endless vacillating had ended in this blunt reality. And yet, Of course, was the first thing I had thought. Yes.

  “It’s certainly a bizarre coincidence,” Alison said. “And I suppose that has to be the truth—either that, or we live in a world where you have to decide between evil and absurdity.” We sat looking at each other. I had no way of knowing how serious she was, or how much of this conversation was like a game to her—fun, like racquetball or Trivial Pursuit. She leaned forward and said, “Oh come on, Christine—you should just check him out. Make some phone calls. I’m so curious!”

  “Alison. Please.” I could feel tears behind my eyes, and I willed them not to spill over. “At this point, I just wish it would leave me alone,” I told her. “I wish I could go back to the way I was. I wish I weren’t sitting in this restaurant being so miserable.”

  I heard my voice rise. Alison looked alarmed. She ran her hand back through her hair; her hair fell perfectly back into place, but her face was troubled: flushed s
lightly, it showed lines, and she looked her age. “Oh, Christine, forgive me. I’ve gotten all wrapped up in this idea. It would explain so much about Orin. But I’m probably wrong. And I for sure don’t want to upset you. I’m sorry, let’s drop it.”

  But I knew that what I needed was to continue. I needed to know the truth, if there was any more truth to be known. I took a deep breath. “I’d like to talk about it a little more, actually,” I said. “Unless you’re in a hurry.”

  She shrugged and shook her head. “I think you do need to talk about it, Christine. And I’m sorry to be such a voyeur, but—” She smiled a little, apologetically. “I’m fascinated, I have to admit it. I mean, nothing this interesting ever happens to me.”

  “Well, why would he use his own name?” I asked abruptly. I seized on this detail because it was baffling but concrete; it was the sort of puzzle Nancy Drew and Miss Marple might discuss profitably together over their tea. “You say he was well-known as an actor in St. Louis,” I pointed out. “Why wouldn’t he use a stage name?”

  “Easier.” Her eyes were bright; she liked it, I could see, that the conversation was becoming normal again: two women gossiping in a restaurant. “He wouldn’t have to forge anything. But I think the main thing is that it introduces an element of risk—of chance. Have you ever been to the track with Orin? He’s really into it—the whole gambling thing. Get him to take you to Belmont sometime.”

  “That answers my next question, I suppose.”

  “What was your next question?”

  “Why would he get involved with me?”

  “The risk?” She smiled again. “Maybe—aside from the fact that he seems to be genuinely crazy about you.” I didn’t smile back. She said, “And then there’s the idea that if he’s ready to come out of hiding you’d be the one he’d trust.”

  “But I’m the one who found him,” I pointed out. “It was sheer chance, my sitting next to you on the train, and then following it up, calling you, calling him.” I didn’t know Pierce at all, as it turned out: how could he know me so well? How could he know I would act? Pierce, who once told me I lacked passion. I added, “At least, I assume it was chance. Who knows?” I felt slightly ridiculous, but I had to say it. And what did I have to lose? I had already shown Alison all my worst, craziest sides. “I mean, you and Orin are friends, you know him pretty well, and if there’s some sort of deception going on—”