I frowned. And Ralph Diggs?
Somehow, he had found out about the events at the Belle Ruin. I knew I was getting ahead of myself to think this fellow knew he’d been kidnapped, or stolen out of the hotel, twenty years ago.
For how could he come to know that? He would first off have to discover the man and woman he always thought of as Mom and Dad weren’t his parents. How? Was it as simple as an overheard conversation?
“Shouldn’t we tell him.”
“Why? Why should we?”
“Doesn’t he deserve to know we’re not his real parents?”
And so on.
For I knew he wasn’t who he said he was, and that he’d taken this job so he could hang around us, not us at the Hotel Paradise necessarily, but around Spirit Lake. Or maybe La Porte. He wanted to be in this area. I knew he wanted to be able to stop awhile around here.
And that he had a spectacular motive for doing this.
47
Carl Mooma was probably a more dependable source than Gloria Spiker Calhoun; still, I wanted to clear up one little point, and I could take fifteen or twenty minutes to see Gloria before the train came.
The Calhoun house was the prettiest blue house I’d ever seen. Maybe it was just that the colors of houses in Cold Flat Junction were a relief from the white-wood-and-green-shuttered Victorians in Spirit Lake. (Spirit Lake, though, had a lot more money in it than the Junction.)
As I walked up the zinnia-brightened path to the blue house, I wondered if I’d ever see Gloria’s husband, Cary Grant Calhoun. I still wanted to verify whether he looked like Cary Grant, the movie star his mother had idolized, or if he was as unattractive as the people in the Windy Run Diner had said. He was probably just ordinary-looking.
“Hi, Gloria,” I said when she came to the door.
“Why, hello, Emma. Come on in. I’m just about to take a batch of lemon drop cookies out of the oven!”
As if that were great news. The housewives in Cold Flat Junction all seemed to think cookies were the high point of their day. I guessed I’d have to eat one to be polite. “Oh, swell,” I said, walking with her back to the lemony-smelling kitchen that looked so neat you’d have thought nothing was ever baked in it. It was what you called “pristine”: cleared counters, scrubbed sink, polished fittings.
Gloria had the oven door open and the cookie pan she slid out held perfect little circles of pale yellow cookies. I didn’t like lemon except in my mother’s lemon meringue pies. And she never made lemon cookies.
Gloria pushed nearly half the panful of cookies out on a glass plate the same blue as the house. Indeed, this place was as blue as Prunella Rice’s was brown. Did they know they had a competition going?
She held the plate of cookies out to me.
“Oh, I wish I could have one, but you know I have sugar diabetes. I especially am not supposed to eat baked goods. Pastries and things.”
Poor Gloria’s hand flew to her face as if she’d been enticing me toward death.
I supposed you died if you ate a lot of sugar, but my thinking was fuzzy on the point. I knew that people had to get shots of something for the condition. “My! It’s after eleven and will soon be time for my shot,” I said.
Gloria looked as if she might be going to call for medical attention.
“Oh, don’t worry. It can wait until noon.” I sat down on a kitchen chair as if I might be going to be dizzy just from smelling sweetness.
“You have to take shots? You mean insulin?”
“Insulin shots, that’s right for sugar diabetes, yes. But I just give them to myself.” I smoothed my hands over my skirt. “I just wanted to ask you something.”
She sat down too, in a scrubbed-to-death pine chair. “You still writing that story about the Belle Ruin?”
“That’s right. You remember when you were in the Slades’ room at the hotel? When they told you not to bother the baby?”
Gloria nodded. “It was she that told me. Said the baby was sick or something and would probably just sleep on.”
“Think carefully. What you said was that Mrs. Slade told you not to bother her, is that right?”
Gloria frowned. She answered slowly, as if she feared a trap. She should have, but not from me.
“I guess that’s what she said.”
“All I mean is, did she tell you ‘don’t bother her’? Or ‘don’t bother Fey’? Or maybe just ‘the baby’?”
Relaxing a little (the question seeming so innocuous, I guessed), she pursed her mouth thoughtfully and said, “Well, I think she just said not to bother the baby, or, no . . . ‘It’ is what she said. I remember now. She referred to the baby as ‘it.’ That’s kind of cold, don’t you think?”
I certainly did, but it served my purpose well. So I agreed with her about the coldness. I was sure that Gloria must have remembered every instant pretty clearly. Given her criminal part in it.
I thanked her and jumped up—my insulin shot, you know—and left hurriedly.
48
Why was it that Ree-Jane chose this particular time to go mad?
Although the mad ordinarily must have their fates chosen for them, with Ree-Jane conscious calculation had to be involved.
I’ll say this: it was really attention-getting, the way she went twirling around the porch in her Heather Gay Struther tiny-pleated rhubarb pink dress, singing “Bye Bye Blackbird.”
I had heard the singing before I reached the porch. She was both singing and laughing, holding up her skirt at the sides.
“What are you doing?” I asked this in a loud voice.
She didn’t answer. But I knew she’d heard me because her eyes slithered sideways and her crazylike smile got wider. I stood and watched until she got through the part about no one loving or understanding her (while I thought, How true). Then I veered off toward the kitchen to fix the salads.
Vera was there, white-collared and -cuffed. She reminded me of pictures I’d seen of old English tombs, where the knight and lady were laid out in stone atop their stone caskets, their stone faces sharp and gaunt.
We must be having a dinner party. “Who’s coming?”
“The Baums,” said Vera, unsmilingly.
“How many?”
“Eight. I can handle it.”
She could handle eight hundred, she was so efficient. That was fine with me. I lined up the salad plates, ten of them, two for Miss Bertha and her party.
My mother was concentrating on the electric mixer, adding oil drop by drop into the bowl, so it must be Roquefort cheese dressing. She could not be disturbed in this process, any more than Agatha Christie could, writing the end of one of her books that Miss Flyte’s dying friend never read. So I waited until she was done before I asked, “What’s the matter with Ree-Jane?”
She shrugged. “We don’t know.” She pushed the lever that released the big bowl of the mixer and poured the contents into two large mason jars.
The “‘we’ don’t” told me there’d been discussion about it, so they thought it was more than just Ree-Jane being herself. I was about to pass on the information that she was on the porch whirling like a dervish (and hoping she’d keep it up until the Baum party pulled up under the porte cochere), when Mrs. Davidow slammed into the kitchen. For once the color high in her face wasn’t from drinking. She shouldered my mother along to a corner out of hearing distance and her mouth started working furiously. Happily, I sorted through the olives, looking for a small one to hide under one of Miss Bertha’s lettuce leaves.
Then to my great surprise, Lola Davidow headed toward me like a tanker approaching a pleasure boat. Was it to be all my fault?
“Emma, I want you to go out to the front porch and try to stop Jane singing.”
I dropped the lettuce leaf. My help was being requested? I was to de-twirl Ree-Jane? Oh, but what a great assignment!
I figured, as I walked toward the front of the hotel, that if the act was to get attention, Ree-Jane would be happy to have people try to shut her up; on the oth
er hand, if she was really going mad, nobody could stop her. In either case it looked fairly hopeless.
Just then, Miss Bertha was coming down the staircase and holding to the banister as if the steps were made of glass. “What is all this commotion?”
“Jane Davidow.” I smiled.
She grunted as she maneuvered the slippery slope of the stairs and asked where Ree-Jane’s mother was. I told her and she set off like a little steam engine, going pretty fast for her.
It was then that Ralph Diggs appeared, as he often did, seemingly out of nowhere, though of course it wasn’t; he’d probably been walking down the hallway of the left wing, hidden by Miss Bertha on the stairs. Now he had come around and was here.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” I flopped down in an armchair and picked up a magazine. “Nothing” was hard to believe, what with Ree-Jane dancing and singing past the front screen door.
He walked to the door and watched and listened. He was wearing his linen “bellhop” jacket, probably ready to open car doors for the dinner guests. He plucked the cigarette from behind his ear and lit it with his Zippo, which he let fall again into his jacket pocket. He made no move to go out onto the porch.
In another few minutes, Lola Davidow was coming through the hall from the direction of the dining room, looking determined and ruddy-faced.
Lola saw Ralph and immediately nodded him over to join her. That annoyed me. I was angry with myself for letting him detour me away from going out on the porch, but what chance would I have anyway to try and stop Ree-Jane’s nutty behavior, what with her mother here and now Ralph on the job.
I could not imagine why he would be taken into anyone’s confidence, or be included in any plan to calm Ree-Jane, who was singing louder than ever.
Of course, they didn’t know what I knew—or thought I knew—about him, but couldn’t Mrs. Davidow see through the flattery and smiles enough to realize he was putting her on? She wasn’t what you’d call a “student of human nature,” but she wasn’t stupid about people either. I’d heard enough talks between her and my mother that showed she could cut some people open like a watermelon and count the seeds. At the same time, I thought Mrs. Davidow might at times be starving for flattery and would take compliments any way she found them and from anyone. I mean, how long could I put up with Dwayne, do you think, if I didn’t have the hide of a buffalo?
Will could put something over on her, but then Will, even at his age, was smoother than Ralph Diggs. He just wasn’t as insinuating, you could say. Will’s smoothness came partly from being raised in a hotel, and partly because he’d been born smooth. I pictured him as a baby being picked up by a nurse and gently sanded down until there were no sharp edges anywhere.
But Rafe Diggs was all sharp edges.
Mrs. Davidow was putting keys in his hand and I heard her telling him to bring the car around. I wondered what car and why he was to drive it. Then she said something about a hospital and Cloverly. Cloverly was twenty-five miles away, and twice the size of La Porte. I hadn’t known it had a hospital.
Then Ree-Jane came in. No: I should say she entered, she made an entrance, her face bright and flushed, her eyes nearly sparking from all of this excess energy she’d found. She fairly flew across the lobby and up the stairs.
I watched Ralph watching her with that little sideways smile of his, not a smirk, exactly, but not far from it. Was that car key in his hand a good idea?
When Mrs. Davidow separated herself from yet another phone call and headed toward the back office, I followed. Probably my opinion didn’t count for much, but I said, “Ralph Diggs driving Ree”—I caught myself—“driving Jane anywhere. You can’t trust him.”
She stopped and looked at me. “She won’t go with me and we have a dinner party, so your mother can’t drive her. Who else is there?” She had poured herself a measure of Jim Beam and now tossed it back, neat.
Well, I had to admire her, in a way. I guess for not flying apart, for not yelling and making a scene. And what scene could ever follow Ree-Jane’s act? For it was an act, surely?
I said at least someone else should go along. I was thinking of Will. But she said, no; Jane thought everyone was against her.
I left the back office just in time to see Ree-Jane more or less waltzing down the stairs with a small suitcase. She had dressed up the rhubarb by winding a blue silk scarf around her neck.
Ralph said he’d be back in time for the Baums’ party. Easily. It was only a little after five and Cloverly was only twenty-five miles away.
With her suitcase and her merry face and her devil-may-care attitude, you’d have thought they were a happy couple dashing off on their honeymoon, not going to the loony bin.
We stood on the porch, we three, and watched the white convertible bucketing along down the gravel drive, Ree-Jane’s sea blue scarf whipping back in the wind, her arm raised and her hand waving, waving like one of the happy, rich women above the beach at Deauville, in one of Aurora’s travel posters. Waving whatever was left of the sane world farewell.
Ralph Diggs did come back, as he said, inside of two hours. He was there to grace the front steps when the Baums arrived. I did not hear what he told Mrs. Davidow and my mother later, in the kitchen, even though I got my tray as close to their little group as I could where they were gathered by the salad table; or even though I hung around the crock of salad dressing as long as I could. Strangely, I kept reminding myself of the maid in her black uniform, kneeling at the keyhole on the magazine cover, even though Vera was the black-uniformed, white-cuffed one among us.
After dinner, I hung around the long hall where Ralph’s room was. When I heard someone coming up the stairs that led from the dining room to the second floor, I walked quickly into the hall bathroom, and when I heard the steps in the hall, I came out, casually flicking off the light switch as I left.
“Oh, hi.”
Ralph Diggs nodded, but didn’t say anything. Yet he stopped as if inviting conversation.
I accepted. “Well, that must have been pretty hard driving all the way to Cloverly and back in time for dinner, wasn’t it?”
He leaned against the wall in that lounging way of his and took the cigarette from behind his ear. It was like the way he’d drawn the coin from behind mine, the magic gesture. He almost always had that cigarette behind his ear. It reminded me of Dwayne with his oily rag. It had never occurred to me before that maybe the rag was a comfort, something you could depend upon, something always by you. So maybe the cigarette was a comfort for Ralph. I wondered if my roundabout ways were like that.
Finally, he answered. “I’m a fast driver.”
“Still, you had to take Ree-Jane, I mean Jane, into the hospital. I mean you didn’t just drop her off and say, ‘See you later.’”
“No. I went in with her to the admitting desk.”
“What happened?” I asked directly.
“Someone, a woman, came and got her. She took charge.”
He was still for a moment. Then he said, “She didn’t look back. Jane, I mean.”
He said this as if he’d thought about it, as if it were important. I never thought of Ree-Jane as doing anything important in all the time I’d known her.
He said, “I guess you have to feel sorry for her.”
No, I didn’t have to. I found this annoying, really annoying that he should be telling me how to feel. I’d been doing a perfectly good job of feeling for myself before he came along. I said, in a more irritated way than I actually felt, “You think she’s really, you know, mentally ill? I think it’s just a big act, all of that dancing and singing, trying to make people believe she’s, well, interesting, because she’s crazy.”
He was silent for an uncomfortably long moment. The thing was, his silences carried a weight of words I didn’t get. It wasn’t exactly silence; it was more as if there were another language running beneath his words. It was as if he came from somewhere with a separate language, a language I would never speak
and a somewhere I would never see. Finally, he said, “You’d still have to feel sorry for her. I mean, to be so driven you’d have to go that far.”
This was so intensely sad, I would have taken a step back if the wall hadn’t been there. I tried to rid myself of the feeling with a little sarcasm: “Well, I’m sure you didn’t come here with the idea of having to drive someone to a mental hospital.” I also thought this was a way of getting the subject around to why he was here.
He didn’t speak. He looked at me as if I were something alien to his world.
I added, “You said you were just passing through. What made you stop here and look for a job?”
“I needed a place to stay and I’m low on cash. A hotel, I thought, would be a place that could use somebody.”
It sounded reasonable. Almost.
“You’re not getting paid.”
“No, but I’m getting a room and food. Some food.”
It was the first subject we could talk about without being so guarded. “Yes, it’s some food, all right.”
The cigarette was nearly smoked down by now. A long ash hung from it; I wondered why it didn’t fall. It seemed to levitate. Another bit of magic.
I was not doing a very good job of extracting information, so I said good night and shrugged myself away from the wall and from him.
That night in bed I let my mind drift back over the last few weeks, looking for hints of Ree-Jane’s serious craziness. But all I could see seemed to have been there ever since I’d known her: talking to herself, or, more disturbing, to someone else that no one could see; the awful silent laughter that was meant to suggest to me I was an idiot; acting generally like a six-year-old. I had been sure she was just putting on an act, but that night, I was less sure. And after listening to Ralph Diggs, I wondered, Wouldn’t putting on an act like that be crazy in itself? Then I thought of the picture of the black-uniformed maid kneeling by a door and wondered if maybe I was looking at Ralph Diggs through a keyhole. I turned on my side and watched a shadow on the wall made by the dim hall light coming in through the transom and wondered if I lived a keyhole kind of life.
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