And someone did call.
“Hello, is this Molly Gray?” she asked. When I said yes, she cleared her throat, as if hoping to get rid of her nervousness. “I’m Joan Franklin.” She paused. Waiting for me to recognize her? “Uh, I was given your name by Amelia Waxman. I wanted to talk to you about what happened to Wendy Sonnenfeld. I’m Ben’s first wife.”
I had been on the verge of hanging up, sure that she was a journalist. Two had already tried me and I told them nothing. Until she announced herself, I had forgotten Ben had a first wife—now I remembered Wendy weeping in our dining room, explaining that Ben’s first wife had left him for his best friend.
I guess the memory paralyzed me because her voice said, “Hello? Are you there?”
“Y-yes,” I stammered.
“I wondered if we could get together—I don’t know, it’s strange to ask, but I don’t know who else to talk to.” She had a sweet tone, a little vague, but still smart. “I really need to talk to someone about him and learn a little bit about what happened since I knew him. I know this must sound nutty. Would you mind? Do you understand?”
“No, I don’t mind. I understand.” In fact, I was suspicious, but my curiosity was great (ravenous, really) for anything that might help me control Ben, and anyway it would distract me from the anxiety of the vigil. I said I could see her right away. I’m sure it doesn’t surprise you that when I found out she lived in the town of East Hampton, I didn’t mind the prospect of driving there. In the winter, on a Saturday, there was no traffic. I made it in two hours. En route I had an image in my head that she would live in a trailer or a ramshackle potato farmer’s house. A ridiculous notion—probably there isn’t a residence in poor condition in all of the Hamptons.
In fact, her house was a magnificent Cape, carefully restored. I lingered outside, nervous about meeting her. Seeing her place I fantasized that it had been a whaling captain’s home, picturing its inhabitants during the nineteenth century: delicate women waiting for bearded men, their pale faces staring out of the lead glass windows at the cold ocean, fearful the Atlantic’s gray swelling bosom wouldn’t deliver home their love, but had instead become a grave. This image was calming. Right before I knocked, admiring the stately exterior, the look of it provoked a wish for something I had once prided myself on not wanting—romantic love. To give up the comfort of Stefan for a great passion—that would have made sense. I had the same sensation making this brief trip as I did driving to Maine: I could travel away, keep going, forget it all.
Half your life is still to be lived, a voice pleaded to me.
Was that Wendy talking to me? Maybe she wouldn’t want me to do all this.
The first Mrs. Fliess opened the captain’s door. A glance past her revealed elegance; everything inside looked to be early American antiques, meticulously tasteful, and very expensive. Her looks also surprised me: Joan is a sagging Wasp blonde, skin loose and puffy with middle age, her waist exploded by childbirth. Don’t misunderstand, I think she’s beautiful: hair long and shimmering, eyes bright and keen, complexion ruddy and sweet. It was her Waspiness that startled me. When Ben was married to her she must have been American apple pie incarnate. Like me, a yellow-haired girl. But not like me: in her welcoming smile I saw that she had always been cheerful, rich, and adored.
I also liked her on sight and trusted her pleasing manner. She cocked her head, her weak chin dimpling curiously. “Molly?”
“Yes.” I was shy, like my mother at the door of a summer person’s home, obliged to make a delivery of lobster, yet afraid to come in.
“Thank you for coming. I feel guilty you had to drive so far.” She reached out and urged me in. She told me that she had gotten my number from Amelia Waxman, whom she had seen interviewed on television. “I called her to find out if I could help with the issue of Naomi’s custody. She said you were working on that. I didn’t even know Ben had her—I had this terrible image of some Dickensian orphanage. I know it’s crazy, but I feel responsible somehow. I only met Wendy once. She seemed really nice.” Joan had led me to the couch. She fell back herself into a large wing chair, appeared distracted, and almost shouted: “What happened!”
It startled a laugh out of me.
“I’m sorry. I mean, Ben was always unhappy and messed up, but still…what happened to him?” Her face was wrinkled with worry and wonder.
This left me stupid, mouth open, not knowing how to answer, and not wanting to volunteer information. I stared at her fireplace. Split wood, kindling, and paper were ready to be lit, presumably for the evening. “You tell me—I don’t know,” I stammered.
She was upset. Tears had come to her eyes with ease, and she took no notice of them, which made me think they were a frequent occurrence. I became convinced she didn’t have a motive in talking to me. I had wondered during the drive out what she might be after and I was momentarily alarmed by her bringing up Naomi’s custody, but seeing her think back to her past with Ben and appear so upset, I thought about her situation. She had been married to a man who killed his second wife—it was scary and worrisome. “He used to call me a flake,” she said sadly, quietly, to the floor. “I told him: you dress up in women’s clothes and gamble away twenty thousand dollars on blackjack, but I’m a flake.” She smiled at this memory, as if it were pleasant.
I was stunned by this revelation; I tried to be casual, but I had to hear it again: “You knew about the clothes?”
“Well, he told me he had dressed up alone a couple of times and then he did it one night. Came out of the bathroom all done up, without warning me. I laughed so hard it hurt. He was pissed.”
“Did he hit you?”
“No! Ben? Hit me!” She began a full-throated laugh, but she gulped it down: she forced herself to be serious. “Is that what happened?” she demanded. “I couldn’t tell from the papers. Did she find out about his dressing up and then he killed her?”
“No!” I said, very insistently.
She almost gasped: “You think he’s innocent?”
I hadn’t meant that: I meant I didn’t know what happened the night Wendy was murdered.
Joan raced past, assuming I had agreed. “It’s hard to believe Ben did it. I mean, I haven’t seen him in eight years—people change—but I can’t picture him killing somebody.” She was resting her head on the tall-backed wing chair; now she jerked it forward: “I’m sorry. Do you want something? A drink? Tea? Coffee?”
Her instinct was to take care of me. She was unguarded, friendly, at ease. Like Wendy. How did that creep manage to snare such good women?
“No thanks,” I declined, and then set about clearing up things: “You misunderstood me. I didn’t mean I thought he was innocent”—Joan listened to me with expression: her full cheerful face puckered, weak chin sucking in, the lines in her forehead multiplying—“I meant I didn’t know what happened that night. I have no idea whether he did it or not.”
She gazed off toward the floor, at nothing. Her light blue eyes were fragile and sad. Behind her a gawky black-haired teenage boy thumped, passing through to get to the hallway. He walked with his head down, hoping not to be stopped.
“Your son?” I suggested.
She nodded. “Timmy?” she called out. His thudding up the stairs had already begun.
The drumbeat stopped: “What?” His voice was husky.
“Say hello,” she said wearily.
“Hello,” he droned, and the drum thumped up the remainder of the staircase.
“Sorry,” she apologized for him, which meant she was proud of him.
“He’s a teenager.” I smiled.
“Exactly. He’s really so cute and sweet and kind. He hates to think so.” I believed her: she would raise sweet children.
“You want Ben to be innocent,” I suggested.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Hope that doesn’t piss you off.”
“No, no—”
“It’s been over twenty years, but I was married to him. God, we lived together for four
years. I almost had his…thank God I had an abortion—” She covered her mouth and, I swear, looked about the room as if there might be a nun or a cop or some terrible judge. “Horrible. I don’t know what’s wrong—I keep saying the most insensitive crap to you.”
“You’re upset by what happened.”
“You’re right.” She was surprised. “My Mends keep asking me if I’m bothered…I’ve been saying no…but I am.”
“It could have been you,” I explained.
“No it couldn’t!” She was on the alert now, erect in the chair, her friendly eyes offended. “I left him, you know.”
I reached across and touched her knee: “I didn’t mean it that way. We’re all related, that’s all. You were his first wife—he killed a cousin of yours.”
She agreed. Her lips trembled and her eyes flickered with pain. She shut them and sighed. “Yeah…,” she whispered. For several seconds she was off in reverie. When she returned her attention to me, she asked, “You said he killed her—so you think he did do it?”
I shook my head and shrugged. I hoped she might be someone who could understand this difficult situation: Ben’s guilt was irrelevant—and threatening. “You said he lost twenty thousand dollars. He gambled?”
“All the time. Played poker, backgammon…doesn’t he still?” I shook my head. “Really!” After giving that a moment’s thought, she went on. “He was more interested in gambling than being with me. Who knows what would have happened if he had continued making love to me? We were really happy that first year. He liked to hang out. You know, we’d smoke some dope and drink wine…we were kids, you know.” She leaned forward, her eyes trailing nervously upstairs, and whispered: “Did you ever think about people you knew when you were young? I mean, we were all the same, I thought. I never said to myself: she’s a lesbian, he’s an alcoholic, she’s insecure, he’s a control freak. I think about them all now, stuff we did, and it’s like they were liars or I…I don’t know…or I was a fool.”
“And what was Ben lying about? The dressing up?”
She shook her head impatiently: “Ben was a compulsive gambler.”
“He was that obsessed?” When Joan first mentioned the gambling I assumed his interest in speculation had been diverted into the stock market, but this seemed as if she were describing someone else.
“When I was married to him, anyway. It hit me one day. I remember I was”—she smiled—“on the toilet, furious at him for being out all night again, losing again, and I thought: he’s a compulsive gambler. Made him seem like a character on a soap opera.”
I smiled. “I know what you mean—”
“That wasn’t Ben to me—the compulsive gambler. Thinking about him like that—objectively—made him unreal. It wasn’t the guy I lived with. Even though he fit all the descriptions, did all the same sick things…”
“I know exactly what you mean.” It had taken me years to say to myself: my father is an alcoholic. Even now I consider it a fact that describes him incompletely. Again I reached across and touched her on the knee briefly—maybe to make sure she was real. I felt close to her, grateful for her candor and warmth. I was happy I had come. At last, for the first time since the murder, I had someone sympathetic to talk to.
“I kept telling myself it was temporary, that if—can’t fall for that, you know,” she interrupted herself. “That’s what we always believe, right?”
“What do we believe?” I smiled at the phrase—I was glad at the prospect that I might be united with the rest of world in some way.
“That we can change a man. We talk it out with them so they’ll change. We throw them out so they’ll change. We make them soup so they’ll change. We do what they want so they’ll change.”
“But they don’t change,” I said tediously.
“Don’t be fooled. They don’t.” She smiled at me. “I don’t make that mistake anymore. If a man’s not perfect right from the start”—she made an umpire’s gesture with her thumb—“he’s outta there.”
I hardly breathed as I took this in, numb to the comedy of her presentation, sensitive only to her truth.
Joan leaned forward, a naughty look in her eye, and whispered: “When my marriage to my husband—Howard, my second husband, the man I was really married to, the father of my children—” She chuckled at the phrase, then stalled out because of some private thought, and had to start up again: “What was I saying? Oh yeah, Howard. When we were falling apart I got so desperate I decided it was because I didn’t like to, you know, to give”—she rolled her eyes and abandoned modesty—“blow-jobs.”
Now all the grief swelled and thickened, shot with novocaine, nerves dead to pain, and I could laugh…even though the world might still be drilling in the cavity. I leaned back, a friend in this stranger’s home, and laughed.
“So I forced myself,” she continued in a whisper, checking with one eye that her sons weren’t nearby. The contrast was funny: this respectable, somewhat dowdy middle-aged woman, discussing oral sex. “Gave him one every day: first thing in the morning, instead of lunch, before, after, during dinner—anytime I thought he was shutting me out. Otherwise, I was as honest as hell, screaming at him the second he acted like a pig. I was free, I was open, I was generous, I was selfish. Boy, Howard was one confused puppy. Two weeks later he walked out. I became the kind of woman he wanted and it scared the shit out of him.”
“Nothing works,” I said. The words were gloomy, but I was smiling, chuckling, nodding. I regained the hopefulness I used to know when I was with Wendy. If others feel what we feel—no matter how sad—it can be borne, right? “I never had the guts,” I told her.
“Guts…?”
“To have a real relationship. I watched everyone else do it. I watched Wendy do it.…” I allowed the obvious to hang in the air.
“You’re married.” She nodded at my wedding ring. I wore a plain thin band, presumably because of elegance. Just there to show the information, not to celebrate or brag.
“I don’t have to please him,” I said. It actually hurt to confess that. I never liked to speak ill of Stefan or my marriage. Even with Wendy I was elliptical, at best, about it.
“That sounds great!” she cheered, sitting forward, leaning her chin on her hand, her eyes shimmering with curiosity.
“It’s not real.” I had to swallow hard and shut my eyes. I felt a wave of misery, a fever swimming through my muscles, weakening me. I had confided in no one, you see, since Wendy’s death. The closest I had come to a real confidence was when I cried and told Ben I needed to take care of Naomi. My talks with Stefan and Brian were about tactics, about improving things (the way men deal with tragedy)—I had said nothing from my heart to a woman, to someone who would understand it with her feelings, and not impatiently toss me a how-to manual.
“Maybe you just feel guilty that things are equal.”
“What do you mean?”
“Want some tea?” she asked, getting up. “Say yes. I like to drink tea with people I want to become friends with. Like little boys sticking a pin in their fingers and becoming blood brothers.”
I followed her into the kitchen. The room was like her, big and sunny, cabinets painted light blue, counters messy from the random snacking of a happy family—it welcomed you to be casual and nourished.
“I mean that maybe you have a good thing and you can’t accept it.” She threw this back, over her shoulder, while she went about making tea and offering cookies. “It’s easy for us to say we deserve this and we deserve that, but it’s hard to take what’s ours, especially if we’ve been raised to give it away.”
“I wasn’t.”
She almost dropped the bag of Chips Ahoy. “Come on. We were all raised that way!”
“Not me.” I insisted on my distinction. I told her my story—that is, the part about Naomi Perlman paying for my education and being my mentor. She listened, fascinated—as everyone did—but her interest was especially greedy. She hunched over her tea (she brewed it, kept the pot w
arm in a cozy, and served it in gaudy cups and saucers made of fine china), but she drank me in, leaving the cup alone. For that matter I poured myself, gratefully, into her. I had forgotten I was there to interview her.
“She did a bad thing to you,” she said when I was done. “Don’t be offended—I’m always stepping on people’s toes without knowing it. I don’t take what I say seriously so I don’t expect anyone else to. Just tell me to shut up and I will.”
“I’m not offended,” I said. But I had stiffened, alerted at an ancient post, on guard against a lifelong enemy.
“She made you choose between her and all the great stuff she could give you and your parents. I mean, they were poor and they were your parents and they had problems. That’s not fair. Too much for a little girl to handle.”
I frowned and shook my head. “I made the choice.”
“Have you done that to yourself?” She pulled her hair back, painfully, exposing a high, broad, intelligent forehead.
“Done what?”
“Taken the responsibility for that decision on yourself?”
“It was my decision. I told you: she gave me a chance to go back.”
“Honey.” Joan stopped torturing her hairline and let her flop of blond hair fall forward. Its return rounded and sweetened her face again, but it subtracted the wisdom of her high brow. She put her warm smooth palm on top of my hand, looked into my eyes, and patted my knuckles firmly, in time with each sentence, her touch making the periods: “You didn’t have a prayer. Your father drank. He knocked your mother around. He neglected you. Then this fabulous rich young woman appears, offers to give you the world—and at age eight you’re supposed to say, ‘Gee I’d rather stay in the trailer until Daddy decides to start beating the crap out of me.’” She rubbed my hand where she had tapped me and her weak chin sucked in sympathetically: “You didn’t have a choice.”
The Murderer Next Door Page 19