When No One Was Looking

by Rosemary Wells

  “Marty, please.”

  “Don’t ‘Marty, please’ me. Get back behind that base line. Now I’m going to stand here and serve to you from the middle of the court. These are smashes, Kathy. I’m going to place the ball all over. You miss one and you get ten more. I don’t care if I have to do it a hundred times. Now move your feet and you’ll be cold for about two more seconds.”

  Gamely Kathy chased down Marty’s vicious shots, which even under normal circumstances would have been difficult to return. She lunged for one and fell.

  “Get up,” said Marty. “Here’s another one.” Kathy ground her teeth together and charged across the court clumsily. When she missed it completely, Marty propped her racket against the net, folded her arms, and announced, “You are playing tennis completely without heart.”

  “I’m sorry, Marty.”

  “Do you think I’ve given you half your lessons free, wangled you into the Plymouth Club, and poured my lifeblood into you just to watch you fold over at your first big challenge?”

  Kathy brushed at her dirty, bleeding knee and shook her head.

  “What are you crying about?”

  “I’m not crying.”

  “Oh! Is it raining then? Come here.”

  Kathy ambled up to the net. She could feel the vibrations of fury and fear in Marty more than she felt the sharp wind.

  “You know, don’t you?” Marty asked softly.

  Kathy nodded.

  “You didn’t have any breakfast, I bet.”

  “Couldn’t eat,” said Kathy, wiping the cold sweat off her mouth with her sleeve.

  “Come on. We’ll go over to the diner. I’ll get some eggs and bacon into you.”

  Only one other customer was present in the diner at this hour. Idly he dinted his spoon against his coffee cup as he read the paper.

  “Stop that!” said Marty after he had done it for a full minute. When a plate of eggs, bacon, and English muffins was delivered to each of them, Marty announced that she had noticed Mr. Hammer’s car in Kathy’s driveway the evening before while she happened to be driving by. “And what did our fine, fat school superintendent have to say for himself?” she asked. Before Kathy could answer, Marty turned again to the man in the booth behind her. “If you don’t stop that irritating banging,” she said, “I’m going to take that spoon away from you.” The man glanced at Marty with guilty eyes. He folded his paper, dropped a quarter on the table, and left.

  “So!” said Marty cheerfully. “Now we’re alone. Eat your eggs before they get cold. What did Mr. Hammer have to say?”

  “Well, they kind of smoothed everything over,” said Kathy, toying with an egg.

  “Yes? And how do you like Mr. Hammer?”

  “He ... well, he scares me. I think he’s a male chauvinist pig,” said Kathy.

  “I can do without the birdbrain lingo of your generation. What did he say?”

  “Everyone seems to be ... upset about what happened to Ruth Gumm.”

  “No kidding?” said Marty.

  Kathy heaved a sigh. “I don’t care anymore,” she said.

  “What don’t you care about?”

  “Tennis. The fun’s gone out of it. I was awake all night thinking, Marty. What I was supposed to be thinking about was a ball game I went to at Fenway Park the night before Ruth drowned. If I can remember something about the game, I guess I can prove I was there. But all I could think about, over and over in my mind, was that maybe somebody who cares about me, maybe even somebody who loves me ... did this thing for me, and if I ever have a chance to do something decent in my life, maybe I should make some sacrifice. The biggest one I could make, to kind of atone for what happened. I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t even a big sacrifice anymore. I don’t feel like playing a game if it involves tricks like this.”

  “That she drowned, died, was an accident,” said Marty, “no matter how you look at it.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It was done on my behalf by somebody who ... who ...

  “By somebody not too nice? Is that what your Mr. Hammer, who let you cheat on an algebra exam, told you?”

  “How did you know about the book he left in the room?”

  “It was obvious. The minute your mother told me he was going to proctor your final exam, I put two and two together. Tell me something, my dear.”

  “What, Marty?”

  “In all the time I’ve been coaching you, no matter how much of an impatient, intolerant, prejudiced old maid I may seem to be, have I ever, ever once told you to call an opponent’s ball out when it’s on the line? Have I ever told you to blink at a serve that just hits the back of the tape? Have I ever sat in the stands and given you a bunch of signals? Haven’t I told you before every match that if you just think a ball is out, you call it in and give your opponent the benefit of the doubt? Haven’t I?”

  “Yes, Marty.”

  “And why do you think I’ve instilled this into every girl and boy I’ve ever coached?”

  “I guess because deep down you’re an honest person.”

  “No, my dear,” Marty said, “that is not the answer at all.”

  Kathy sat silently, confused, as she waited for Marty to swallow her coffee. She tried to take a bite of her English muffin, but it tasted horribly dry. She washed it down with water.

  “Because cheating is stupid, my dear,” said Marty, glaring at Kathy’s down-turned eyes. “Either you can do a thing or you can’t, and that’s the beginning and the end. Do you think Einstein cheated when he made up the theory of relativity? Do you think Van Cliburn cheats when he’s playing at Carnegie Hall? Do you think Margaret Court ever cheated at Wimbledon? Sure you can win a few games. Maybe even up your ranking a couple of notches if you’re clever, but nobody ever gets any place cheating. There will always be another Ruth Gumm around the corner for you. Do you know that?”

  “Yes, Marty.”

  “So where the hell were you that night?”

  “I told you. I went to Fenway Park.”

  “It sounds like you. Can’t you prove it? Don’t you have your ticket stub or something?”

  “No, but Mr. Hammer says it doesn’t matter anyway.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter to the police. But it matters to the New England Lawn Tennis Association. I can tell you that. The girl’s parents are raising holy hell. He can’t fix them, but I can.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you think I’m doing right now?”

  Kathy frowned. “Sitting having breakfast with me?”

  “You are so dense, my dear. You’re lucky you’re an athlete. Of course I’m sitting here with you instead of sitting in my own office. For two whole weeks I’ve been turning over in my mind whether you had the gall, the stupidity, and the shallowness in your ambitious little soul to do something as pathetic and rotten as spiking that pool with chlorine. Now I’m quite convinced you didn’t, and I intend to clear my own name pronto. You my dear,” she added, “wouldn’t have had the brains to think of it.”

  In her shock and muddleheadedness Kathy ignored the insult. “You mean you’ve been protecting me all this time?” she asked.

  “Aha!” said Marty in mock astonishment. “The fog clears! All aircraft are now taking off and landing in Katherine Bardy’s brain!”

  “You think I was too stupid, Marty? That’s why?”

  Marty speared an enormous bite of scrambled egg, bacon, and toast with her fork, letting Kathy wait while she ate it. “No,” she said at last. “Of course not, Kathy. But I do have access to your heart and soul, my dear, which even your immediate family doesn’t have because they don’t spend hours a day every day of the week observing you. You lost heart out there today, Kathy, because Mr. Hammer had convinced you that somebody with your future in mind might have inadvertently murdered Ruth Gumm.”

  Kathy winced at the word murdered.

  “Not a nice word,” said Marty, “but you can’t go around saying manslaughtered. Anyway. Had you been responsible for the accide
nt, you wouldn’t have lost heart out there today, the morning after Hammer talked to you. You would have either lost heart the minute you heard the prank went wrong, or you wouldn’t have lost heart at all. I guessed you had nothing to do with it when you played so well in Florida, but I wasn’t absolutely positive until now.”

  “You mean you actually thought I did it?”

  “Didn’t you have your moments of doubt about me?” Marty asked.

  “Never. Marty, I defended you like a lion in front of Mr. Hammer. I’m so glad I did, because now I know you took the rap for me.”

  “I’m touched, my dear. But I certainly wasn’t going to take the rap, as you put it, for very long. I have my own career to think about. What I was going to do was get it out of you by hook or by crook because I know I’m the only one who could. I knew that everybody, including your slick Kenneth Hammer, was going to protect their little golden goose. If you had had anything to do with it, Kathy, I would have found out, and then I would have had you kicked out of the NELTA and the USTA so fast you wouldn’t have known what hit you. Now I’ll call up Caroline Collins, who by the way used to be a doubles partner of mine years ago when she was Caroline Shmuckler, and tell her to get the NELTA off your back.” Marty signaled to the waitress. “Please take this young lady’s cold breakfast away,” she said, “and bring her a nice new hot one.” Marty smiled. “Now, when you’re finished, we’ll go over to the club.”

  “But Marty, I thought they wouldn’t let you in!” said Kathy.

  “Oh, yes, they will. First of all I will clear my name immediately because I spent that entire evening, as I spend almost all evenings, at the bar of the East End Steak House, and at least ten people saw me there. Secondly, Kathy, this thing is over, and I want you to know that. It was an accident pure and simple with nobody to blame. I didn’t know that until now, but of all the people at Newton that day Oliver English is much too namby-pamby to do such a thing, no matter how many cow eyes he makes at you. Your mother’s too featherheaded, and Jody has a heart of twenty-four-carat gold. So as you can see, Kathy, no one did it. It’s all over. A tempest in a teapot if you ask me, and I’m going to spend the entire day getting the heart back into your game.”

  Slowly Kathy managed to come back to herself. She slept for two hours on the beach under a towel. Later in the afternoon during a spirited rally with Marty she overheard Mr. Molina’s shrill voice yelling at a beachboy for dropping a pile of chairs. “You know what I told that fat so-and-so?” Marty asked.

  “What?” Kathy asked.

  “Keep the head of your racket down, Kathy. I told him if he ever tried to make a speck of trouble for me again, he’d find his chubby rear in such hot water he’d scream like a plucked turkey. I happen to know a couple of things about Fred Molina’s after-hours activities, and I told him I had a couple of Polaroid snapshots.”

  “But Marty, that’s blackmail!” said Kathy, stopping and letting a ball pass by.

  “Not if I don’t have the photographs,” said Marty. “Now go take a shower and go home and sleep.”

  Kathy bent at the waist and relaxed. “Thanks, Marty,” she gasped.

  “On second thought, it’s a nice day. Do a mile in the sand.”

  Why don’t I cheat on this? Kathy asked herself as she ran down the beach. Why do I cheat on a math test, and then when I’m so exhausted I could drop dead, I still do a stupid mile just because she tells me to? She’s in her office. She’ll never see me. Kathy swore at Marty every step of the way to the appointed marker at the far end of the beach, but she did not run an inch short of it all the same. Invisible people, alive and dead, she thought as she pedaled home slowly. All as if they had little apartments inside my head, sitting there waiting for me to make a mistake, cross them up. Then they send out a general alarm. She wished she could at least eliminate Mrs. Diggins’s pensive, disappointed face. “All my work. All my hard work,” was what Mrs. Diggins said when Kathy conjured her up. In light of the algebra textbook’s having in the end proved irresistible to her Kathy knew that should she one day earn a hundred thousand dollars playing tennis, it would all somehow be lost to her because she couldn’t count it properly. In this picture Kathy, shabby and thin, working behind the counter of a five-and-ten-cents store, encountered a plump, neatly dressed Mrs. Diggins who looked on her pityingly, clucked her tongue, and said, “Should have learned your algebra, Katherine. Now it’s too late.”

  The Future, as mapped out from time to time by each of the adults in Kathy’s life, always involved grave crises that spun like globes on the pinpoints of her weaknesses. One day her kind and handsome husband, who looked just like Bjorn Borg, would walk out on her in despair after she had balanced the family checkbook wrong for the twentieth time. One day a baby might die because it took her an hour to find a doctor’s number in the phone book or because she’d measured fractions of a formula wrong. She had been told of these possibilities and believed them.

  There was a strange car in the driveway. Kathy hesitated and went around to the kitchen door to let herself in. As she threw her sweatbands and rackets into the closet she was aware of an unusual silence in the living room. When she walked into the living room, she was greeted as if for a surprise birthday party by her mother and father and Oliver. Was it her father’s wisdom that had excluded Mr. Hammer from the house? she wondered later.

  “Kathy, sit down. We have terrific news,” was what her father said. He was smiling. Oliver was looking very satisfied, slouched in a hard-backed chair. The strange man sat next to her mother. “Kathy, this is Dom D’Amico ...

  “Chief of police,” underscored Kathy’s mother.

  “Hi, Kathy,” said the chief. He was as friendly as Mr. Hammer but to Kathy less frightening, as his thighs did not bulge so in his clothing. He was a big man but wore a saggy tan suit and seemed, except for his hat, to be just a normal unscary workingman who might have come to see her father about his daughter’s wedding pictures.

  “Hello,” said Kathy, her voice so low she could not hear it herself. “Hello,” she said again after she cleared her throat.

  “Kathy, your worries are over. Over!” repeated her mother.

  “Let Chief D’Amico tell it,” said her father. “That’s what he’s here for ... please?”

  “What’s over?” Kathy asked.

  “Kathy,” the chief began. He seemed uncomfortable. “I just dropped in because your dad here and Ken Hammer said you’d believe this if it came from the horse’s mouth. Well, I guess I’m the horse.”

  Everyone but Kathy, who was not sure what he meant, laughed at the chief’s joke.

  “My boys were up at the club today,” he went on. “Found a cracked valve in the pool’s recirculating system. Called the guy from the pool company. There was no crime, Kathy. All charges have been dropped. It was a mechanical failure, Kathy. A mechanical failure,” he said again.

  “What?”

  “Kathy, they found a crack in the valve down in the drainage system of the swimming pool,” her mother broke in. “That means—”

  “In the pump,” the chief went on. “The crack was near the ... well, I won’t bore you with all the technical details. But I’m here, honey, again because your dad said how important it would be for you to hear it from me. Apparently these cracks just kind of come up once in a while. One in a million. Just like an airplane. Got a crack no one can see. Everyone has all the good will in the world, but the plane comes down all the same. Same thing, Kathy. Same thing.”

  The chief, Kathy noticed, had the same habit as Mr. Hammer. They both used a funny shorthand way of talking.

  “Anyhow,” he said, “the thing was busted, and our best guess is a lot of the chlorine got backed up over a period of time, and then the whole mess went into the pool at once. Poor girl jumped into it. Anyhow. Let me make myself perfectly clear. The cause of death was drowning. There are no negligence charges. There are no other charges or investigations on the books. The slate is wiped clean, Kathy. It’s over.�
�� And so was Chief D’Amico’s speech as he tweaked the crown of his hat and got up to shake Kathy’s father’s hand.

  “But what about the footprint?” Kathy asked.

  Chief D’Amico paused in the doorway. “Honey,” he said slowly and emphatically, “there was no crime. No crime. Do you understand that?”

  “But ... Kathy began.

  Chief D’Amico smiled in much the same way Mr. Hammer smiled, Kathy noticed. Patiently and kindly, as if she were a foreigner whose English was very bad. “Now listen,” he said.

  “Listen, Kathy,” said her mother.

  “Honey, listen,” added her father.

  “I’m listening,” said Kathy.

  “First of all,” he said, “we don’t have a footprint, honey. What we have is a little bit of red clay off a sponge. Okay? Okay. Now even if on the morning your friend drowned we had gone in there with ten detectives, I guaran-damn-tee you we would have come up with an earring here, a sneaker there, a wallet and a hot dog wrapper, and a place so full of footprints and fingerprints we’d have gone crazy. Now. Few days later the girl’s parents are foaming at the mouth that someone tried to hurt their kid. Okay? Okay. We go on what we’ve got, Kathy. We take into consideration everything we see. And what do we see? We see a crack in a valve. We get the guy down from Medford, where they make these pools. The same guy who installed that pool years ago. He confirms it. So what do we do? We file a report saying it’s our best guess that the chlorine backed up in the system and was released by accident. That this may or may not have contributed to the girl’s drowning. In any case there’s no crime. Now what do you want, honey? You want a Perry Mason case here? You want a lot of scandal and gossip? I hear you have a great future, by the way.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Kathy.

  “So, honey, answer me something. Okay? You tell me what evidence amounts to when there’s no crime. Tell me.”

  “I ... I don’t understand,” said Kathy.

  The chief smiled in his patient way again. “Look, Kathy,” he explained, “if, God forbid, I were to drop dead right here in my tracks of a heart attack, a pure, simple act-of-God heart attack, this room, this whole house is full of evidence, isn’t it? You’ve got your dad’s paper there. You’ve got your mom’s magazine, your boyfriend’s car keys, and your tennis racket, right? Okay. But there’s no crime, see, because I had a heart attack. Now do you understand?”