by Jane Langton
“Oh, no? What about that mirror you brought back from Venice? Gold cherubs and curlicues all over?”
“Oh, right.” Mary had to confess defeat. The Venetian mirror was the darling of her heart, but Homer had complained that it wouldn’t go with the cattails in the river or the Canada geese flying over the roof or the map of Fair Haven Bay on the wall. In fact he had been right. It had looked so out of place that she had hung it in the basement, where it gave her a jolt of happiness whenever she descended the stairs. There it was, that elegant souvenir from the city of Venice, enshrining within its glittering frame the underwear on the clothes rack and her own tall shape as she folded the laundry.
So she went by herself.
Gideon Street was pretty much what she had expected, a tree-lined road with Victorian houses alternating with newer ones. Obviously the owners of the old places had sold off their side lots. When?
The newer ones were vaguely colonial. Some were ranch houses with picture windows. Built in the 1950s, guessed Mary, paid for with interest-free mortgages from the G.I. bill.
Number 147 was newer. It was a split-level with an entrance halfway between the first and second floors and a big garage at one side. A couple of pretentious one-and-a-half-story columns flanked the cement steps to the front door.
Mary stared at the door. Was it the one in Leonard’s snapshots? It was an ordinary standard-looking door. She couldn’t be sure.
Boldly, Mary pushed the bell. At once a boy jerked the door open and stared at her. A vacuum cleaner droned upstairs.
“Hi, there,” said Mary. “Is your mother at home? My name’s Mary Kelly.”
The boy turned his head and hollered, “Hey, Mom.”
The musical pitch of the vacuum whined down from a screaming high note to a growl to silence. A woman’s voice shrilled, “Is it a salesperson?”
Mary leaned forward and called, “I just want to ask about some people who lived here twelve years ago.”
The boy shrugged and thumped downstairs. A pink face surrounded with pin curls appeared over the upper railing. “Sorry, can’t help you. We only been here, like, two years.”
“Well, can you tell me the name of previous owners?”
“Jordan, family named Jordan, but they’d only been here six months. I mean she told me, her husband got this job in Georgia so they had to move south and she was really pissed.”
Mary leaned farther into the doorway and craned her neck. “Well, do you know who lived here before that?”
“Nope. Sorry.” The face disappeared and once again the vacuum shrilled into noisy life.
“Well, thank you anyway,” bawled Mary.
“Don’t mention it,” screeched the present owner of 147 Gideon Street.
Mary walked back to the sidewalk. What about the neighbors? Perhaps one of them would remember the people who lived at Number 147 twelve years ago. Surely they would remember the horrible night when the baby was killed.
The next house was a gambrel colonial with chunky pendants under the overhang. A woman answered the door, swinging it wide, beaming at Mary. Then her face fell. Turning, she called to the next room, “It’s not Joan.”
There was a summons, “Come on, Phyllis, it’s your bid.”
Phyllis stared at Mary and said coldly, “May I help you?”
Mary talked fast. “I wonder if you can tell me who was living next door twelve years ago? I’m trying to find the family—”
She stopped as the lady of the house shook her head, pulled down her girdle with a jerk and closed the door to a narrow crack. “Sorry, I can’t help you,” she said, one eye and three teeth visible for a second. “We just moved here from Arlington.”
So that was that. There were five other houses on this side of the street, but at three of them no one answered the doorbell and at the other two the answer was disappointing. Neither family had lived in the neighborhood more than six years. No one remembered the Fells.
But at the house directly across from Number I47 Mary seemed to be on the right track.
“Twelve years? Funny, that’s exactly how long we been here, us Swansons.”
“Then you must have known the family across the street?”
“No, we never met. I think they moved away soon after we came.” The man giggled. “Buncha tramps today, everybody in the modern world.”
“Well, do you remember the accident that happened here, right here on this street, on the night of May twenty-ninth?”
Swanson was a chuckler. “What a coincidence. Musta been the night before we moved in on Memorial Day. A baby, right? Babysitter’s fault, baby got killed? Sure, we heard about it, but it happened just before we got here, just before the moving van arrived with all our stuff. Nice neighbor. Miz Brisket, dead now, she come over with a coffeecake, told us all about it.”
Mary hated to give up. “Well, do you know the name of the previous owner of your house?”
“Not an owner, this place is just a rental.” Mr. Swanson cackled joyfully. “No, I remember the name of the people rented before us, is all. Dunphy, name of Dunphy. Had to leave in a hurry. There was some kind of family trouble, divorce maybe, that’s why they left. Or maybe it was legal hot water. Miz Brisket, she give us the lowdown on the whole neighborhood.” Mr. Swanson cackled again, rejoicing in human frailty. “Told us the dirt about everybody—who beat his wife, whose little kid was a shoplifter.”
“You say the Dunphys were in some kind of legal trouble? She told you that?”
“Could be. Somebody was. I forget who.”
Mary poised her pen over her notebook. “Mr. Swanson, do you know where they went?”
“Who, Mr. and Mrs. Dunphy?” Swanson shook his head, grinning, enjoying his role as the bearer of bad news, the prophet of gloom. “Nope. Haven’t a clue.”
“Well, the owner of the house, then,” urged Mary. “May I have their name and phone number?”
Mr. Swanson’s chuckles were growing tiresome. “Oh, there’s a different one now. The old owner, she died too. Grim reaper been busy. He’s got this big scythe. You know how it is. He never stops bringing in the sheaves.”
53
This time it was up to Homer. He listened soberly as Mary told him about her unsatisfactory exploration of Gideon Street.
“That’s all you’ve got? Dunphy? The name of the people who lived across the street at the time?”
“Yes, but listen to this, Homer. They moved out of the house the very same night.”
A fly droned around the room, buzzing low over their spinach soup, threatening to come down on the edge of a bowl. Homer jumped up and snatched the flyswatter. “The same night? You mean the same night the baby was killed on the road?”
“Right. And they were in a tearing hurry to move out, that’s what Mr. Swanson said.”
The fly drifted to the counter, interesting itself in a box of blueberries. Homer brandished the flyswatter and it dodged sideways, coming down on a china teapot. “Who’s Mr. Swanson?”
“He lives there now, in the house across the street. He said the reason the Dunphys were in such a hurry was, maybe they were in trouble with the law.”
“Maybe?”
“Well, it was some reason or other, like a divorce or some other sort of family disagreement. He told me somebody in the neighborhood had been in legal hot water, and it might have been the Dunphys, he wasn’t exactly sure.”
The fly rose from the teapot. Homer made a wild swipe and missed. “What you need is a street list. The city of Cambridge, they’ll have a list of all the residents on every street. There’s a new list every year. If you get hold of the one for the right year, you’ll find the Dunphys. So at least you’d get their full names, and then you’d have something to work with.”
“And the legal problem? Wouldn’t it be on a computer somewhere? Couldn’t you look up a name, and if they’ve got a record, it’ll be there?”
“Right,” whispered Homer. “Wait a sec.” The fly was circling over the sideboard,
buzzing lower and lower, aiming for a pile of papers. Homer waited for the six-point landing, lifted the swatter high and whammed it down. The fly disappeared, leaving a smear on a page of scholarly footnotes.
“Oh, bravo,” said Mary. “Come on, Homer, sit down and eat your soup.”
Homer hung the swatter back on its nail. “You get me the full names of those people, and I’ll do the rest.”
“What about the issue of privacy? Isn’t it illegal to give out that kind of information? I hope you won’t need another court order?”
“Oh, no. Don’t forget my excellent friend Ernest McAllister. Tried and true-blue, that’s my Ernie.”
54
Twelve years is a long time in the life of a bureaucracy. Most of the men and women who had been functionaries, twelve years back, in the Middlesex County Criminal Records Department had been replaced by new civil servants.
The ex-county clerk who had served the subpoena on Jack Dunphy on the morning of May 29, 1991, now lived far away. He was the candlepin bowling champion of Daytona Beach, Florida. Thus he seldom thought of the old days, being too taken up with intricacies of footwork, grip, stance and follow-through to reminisce about the bad old days of rain, snow, and the dangerous rage of the people on whom he had served his subpoenas.
Therefore no one was left who remembered the time when the Dunphys had disappeared, way back in 1991. The frustration of the county clerk and the obscenities of the prosecuting attorney were all forgotten. The case was merely cold print on page 778a of the county archives, cross-referenced to file 19, 456B in the federal records office.
It had been a case of simple tax fraud. Jack Dunphy had failed to list on his federal tax return for the previous year the sum of five-hundred-thousand dollars of questionable income. Lawyers for the Internal Revenue Service were curious to know (a) the source of the money and (b) why it had not been itemized on his federal return.
Before dawn on May 30, 1991, Jack and Lexine Dunphy had fled their rented house at 142 Gideon Street. Jack had never been seen again.
But Homer found Lexine. She was in the telephone book for the western suburbs.
Consulting the phone book had been Mary’s idea. Granted, it was a stupid idea, but she had been feeling pretty stupid that day. Her summer conference was over. She had delivered her keynote address. At last, emotionally exhausted, she was stretched out on a lawn chair on the porch, staring blankly at Fair Haven Bay and thinking idly about the Dunphys, when it occurred to her that she could still handle the alphabet. Strolling indoors, she stared at the pile of telephone books.
There were fifteen Dunphys. One was Lexine. She lived in Arlington.
“Of course she may not be the right Lexine,” cautioned Homer.
“But Lexine’s not exactly a common name. Especially when combined with Dunphy. I’ll bet she’s the same one.”
Homers appetite was whetted by his disappointment in the Criminal Records Department. He slapped the page and said, “I’ll go.”
Lexine Dunphy’s house was a modest ranch in a neighborhood of similar houses. The lawn was uncut, there were flagstones missing from the walk, the shades were drawn.
“Good morning,” said Homer politely, when a grossly obese woman opened the door. “My name is Homer Kelly. I’m trying to learn something about one of your neighbors on Gideon Street in Cambridge twelve years ago. I hope I’m speaking to the right person? Mrs. Lexine Dunphy?”
Lexine gaped at Homer, then invited him in. He suspected she would have welcomed in the paper boy.
In the kitchen Lexine removed the dirty dishes from the table and piled them with a heap of others in the sink. She swabbed feebly at the oilcloth and said, “Sit down.”
Homer pitied the large unkempt woman in the grubby kitchen.
“You know what today is?” said Lexine, thumping herself down. “It’s my fifteenth wedding anniversary.” The announcement was sarcastic.
Homer gave up any thought of asking questions. It was time to listen. Lexine was letting it all hang out. As she talked, he translated, changing half-truths into candid confessions, changes of expression into revelations.
Her marital history was clear. Homer itemized it in his head—
1. Honeymoon over, Lexine gains weight, Jack’s belly swells.
2. Domesticity turns slovenly.
3. Moments of togetherness reduced to television, Budweiser, salty snacks, greasy chins, fat bodies slumped in big soft chairs.
4. Cute girl at the office! Jack perks up, slims down, buys flashy car, stays late at work.
5. Legal problems, process server, sudden flight.
“It wasn’t my fault we had to skip town,” said Lexine. “I mean it wasn’t my problem. I didn’t embezzle that money. Sure, I was with him in Mexico, but when he disappeared for good, what was I supposed to do? I was broke. I came back home.” Lexine lifted a slack hand. “Mother’s gone. This is my house now.”
The rush of words was over. Lexine leaned back in her chair and lit a cigarette.
Homer cleared his throat. It was question time. “Mrs. Dunphy, I wonder if you remember anything about the night you left your house in Cambridge. Do you remember anything about the evening of May 29th? Do you recall what happened across the street?”
“You mean about the baby?”
Homer controlled his excitement. “You saw what happened?”
“Not till after. We were all packed up. Jack had this rental truck, wanted to take off in the middle of the night. So we were waiting, watching TV. The TV set belonged to the landlady, so it was still there, along with the rest of her crummy furniture. It must have been between eleven and midnight, because it was Johnny Johnson. He had James Mason on the show, you know, the actor, he’s dead now.”
“Did you hear something on the street?”
“Right, there was this squeal of brakes. I remember I turned my head.” The vertebrae of Lexine’s neck were no longer capable of twisting sideways, so she swiveled her whole body to the left. “I didn’t get up to look because I was really so interested in the show.”
Homer nodded, imagining Johnny’s sly questions and the actor’s dignified replies.
“But then there were all these screams,” said Lexine.
“Screams? What kind of screams?? Was it a child? A woman? A man?”
“A woman. Oh, yes, it was a woman all right. You know, real shrill and high, scream after scream. Well, of course when the screaming started I jumped up and ran to the window. Jack too. We both looked out the window.”
Homer said it in a whisper, “What did you see?”
“The dead baby, lying there in the road.” Lexine put her head back and blew smoke at the ceiling.
“What else? Who was screaming?”
“The baby’s mother, Mrs. Fell. She was climbing out of the car, screaming and screaming. She was drunk.”
“How do you know she was drunk?”
“She could hardly stand up. Then her husband got out, he was worse.”
“Are you saying, Mrs. Dunphy, that the car that killed the baby was driven by his own parents?”
“His mother. She was the one got out on the driver’s side. And then she tried to pick up the baby, only she dropped it. God! And then her husband tried to pick it up, but he tipped over and just lay there, only he wasn’t out cold, he was shouting at her. I wanted to yell out the window, but Jack said shut up.” The phlegmatic Lexine shook her head in disgust. “So then she got back into the car and drove it into the garage, leaving her husband and the baby lying there on the street.”
Homer was bewildered. “But I thought it was the babysitter’s fault. The fault of the baby’s cousin? That’s what the paper said.”
“Well, of course it was. That little kid. It must’ve been her fault for letting him get out of the house. She’d gone off to a dance and left him alone.”
“A dance? She went to a dance?”
“Right, I suppose it was this high school dance, like they had one every Friday night
. God! Well, then she came sashaying back, hurrying along the sidewalk, just as Mrs. Fell came out of the garage and tried to get her husband to stand up. I mean, the baby was still lying there. I didn’t recognize the girl at first because she was all gussied up. You know, her face was all smudged with rouge and lipstick and mascara, and she had on these high heels and sort of a cocktail dress.”
“But wasn’t she only about twelve years old?”
Lexine stubbed out her cigarette. “Oh, right, but she’d made herself look a lot older. She must have dolled herself up with her aunt’s lipstick and so on, and then probably she put the baby to bed and walked out, only he climbed out of his crib and toddled out of the house right into the road. And then a drunk driver came along and ran over him, and it was his own mother.”
Homer was speechless.
“It was just so incredible. The mother, she was still screaming. When her niece showed up she flew at her, and her fingernails were stretched out like claws.” Lexine’s fat fingers raked the air. “She scratched the poor kid’s face, so the kid began screaming too and her face was all bloody.”
Homer was still stunned.
“I wanted to call the police, but Jack said hell no.” Lexine lit another cigarette. “But somebody else must have called them, because a police cruiser came along. And, you know, an ambulance. We didn’t want to attract attention, so we turned out all the lights until everything quieted down, and then by three in the morning we were out of there.”
Homer staggered to his feet. “Well, thank you, Mrs. Dunphy. I’m so glad to know the truth about the baby’s death. It’s a big help.”
Lexine too struggled up from her chair by pushing down on the table with both hands. “Don’t mention it. Have a piece of cake?”
“Oh, thank you, no. You’ve been very kind.” Homer escaped, his mind reeling.
All men are at each other’s throats.
M. C. Escher
55
There was a new display of hats in the show window of Maud’s Twice-Told Togs, the little secondhand boutique on Huron Avenue between the laundry and the gilt-edged grocery store.