by Tom Drury
The couple signed some papers and the boy wrote his name in big block letters. “Things are going to be very different from here on out,” he said.
After the strange ceremony ended and the family had gone, Rudolph Bonner asked Paul to come by the Saberians Guild sometime and give a luncheon talk. “I’ve heard that you’re in the Witness Security program,” he said. “Everyone is curious about how that works. You must have some interesting anecdotes.”
“Not really,” said Paul. “See, no one is supposed to know about that.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said the lawyer. “But don’t worry. The Saberians Guild is a secret society.”
“I don’t think so,” said Paul.
“Can’t twist your arm then?”
“It’s an honor to be asked.”
The court papers in Pete Lonborg’s suit against the Hanovers had been sealed for twenty-one years, but those years had elapsed, and so Rudolph Bonner allowed Paul to look through a red folder in a small room with law books and a bumper-pool table. Paul spread the documents on the green felt between the rubber-ringed bumpers. The estate of Linda Tallis, with Pete Lonborg as its executor, had charged Gilbert and Evelyn Hanover and the board of the Adelphic School with conspiring to remove Linda Tallis from her position as teacher of the biological and chemical sciences, resulting in a projected loss of salary and pension equaling $348,312.92. The lawsuit said the school board had fired Mrs. Tallis “at the behest of Gilbert Hanover, whose bodily relationship with Mrs. Tallis, as documented in Appendix D, had in the bracing light of day caused him second thoughts, leading to a desire on his part to have Mrs. Tallis dismissed from the school.”
Paul found Linda’s letter to her daughter beneath a receipt for a dozen white roses.
August 11, 1967
Dear Kim:
Your father was born in 1922 in a house with high windows. The reason the windows were high was because your father’s people were servants, and the family they worked for did not want them to be able to look out the windows and see anything that was going on in the big house. They worked for the Pail family. The Pails had once been partners with the Hanovers in the match factory and with good luck had sold out handsomely to the Hanovers before the necrosis scandal kicked the stock price down to nothing. Old Man Pail invested most of the money with the Cicada Trust Company, on 17th Street in New York City, but Cicada failed in the Panic of 1907, and the testimony of Stephen and Everett Pail would help pass the Aldrich-Vreeland Act. The family was also mentioned in a folk waltz of the time, whose chorus went, “If I fall out of New York City / I will land on soft moss.” This is because the Pails had hedged their bets by buying stock in an obscure maker of vacuum tubes called the Moss Transfer Company, whose orders soared out of sight after the saving of the SS Republic via radio messages in 1909. Then the Depression wiped the Pails out and the big house burned. Your father was seven years old. The last Pail man left Ashland many years ago, signing the land and remaining house on String Lake over to his servants’ family. You come from worker stock, which may help you in the uncertain years ahead.
Your father returned home from World War Two at the age of twenty-three and went to work as a carpenter. He had an artistic touch, and to have a staircase finished by Roman Tallis became a point of status around Ashland. He was lanky and arrogant, I am told, with dark skin and small and indifferent eyes that were yet very piercing. I first saw Roman in 1955 when I was a junior in high school. The debate team was debating in the high school auditorium one afternoon when he appeared in the doorway to bid on the carving of the Spartan’s head that still resides today over the stage. (Roman was not happy with the way the carving came out, but then, he was never happy with the way things turned out.) I was on that debate team. I even remember the question: “Resolved: Hunger is unavoidable.”
I knew two things only about Roman: that he had been in the war and that he was “the staircase man.” Someone said he worked without shoes, unless it was too cold, and though still young, we understood this to be a hopeless affectation. Yet high school no longer held my attention. I had the bad luck of being born with good looks, and I write this neither with pride nor with feeling sorry for myself. Maybe a little of feeling sorry for myself. Just by looking at people I could transport them to a blurry dreamland that made it impossible for them to talk to me. You will see someday that I am right, because it will happen to you. I could not blink or hum or whistle a popular song without creating waves of anxiety. I had done nothing to earn anyone’s love or terror, but neither was there anything I could do to stop it. Even Mr. Tremlow had gone crazy. He had been the voice coach, and once after a chorus recital in Amherst during my sophomore year he stole me away to Montreal. I went along, foolishly, because he was a handsome man and always carried a walking stick. We slept together in the Excelsior Hotel in Montreal, where on the third night he was so crazed that he struck me with the walking stick hard enough to break the blood vessels in my leg. The house detective heard my screams and Mr. Tremlow went to jail for one year and I came home to Ashland on a bus. No one blamed me, but really they did, they blamed my body and my face and the wicked city of Montreal. My parents — your grandparents — then took me out of the chorus and put me in the debate team.
Roman and I dated off and on during my senior year in high school, and later when I went to teachers’ college in Waterbury. I liked the fact that he was older, because he did not stand around with his hands in his pockets like the kids my own age. We were married in 1961 at St. Polycarp of Smyrna’s in Ashland. Your Uncle Pete served as best man, for Roman had no friends then, just as he has no friends today. That’s what the model airplanes are about, being friendless. We moved into the house with high windows in which I stand writing this letter. Roman had been charming at first and he convinced me (how? I have often wondered) that he was carefree, but his charm was the charm of the selfish, bound to turn cold when I proved myself to be an insufficient mirror of his own self.
I enjoyed teaching but found myself with nothing to do all summer, and I could not accept the fact that I was supposed to lock myself away in the woods in this bizarre damp house, scrubbing and cooking and being the maid of a self-obsessed woodcarver. I felt like Snow White but without the peasant dresses and helpful animals. Nothing had prepared me for this. The housewife scandal will be found out one day. No one sees it for what it is. Roman’s mother would come over and write lists of things I had done wrong with the house. She gave me a little book called A Treasury of Household Hints, which I found to be such a vicious joke that one endless morning I decided to tear the pages out and burn them one by one in the fireplace. The only reason I didn’t go ahead with this plan was because of the drawings in the book, of a slender housewife with thin dresses and a small, heart-shaped face. I suppose I saw myself in that incompetent mascot. In one illustration she had accidentally sewn the hem of her dress to the slipcover of an upholstered chair so that, as she backed away from the chair, the dress was pulled away from her in front and drawn tight behind. She was knock-kneed in high heels, material had unfurled on the floor around her, and this illustration made me very restless. I am looking at it right now and I feel some of the old restlessness. Maybe it has to do with the hint on the opposite page: “For smooth running and lightning speed, oil that typewriter. First, the bearings at each end of the cylinder; then, the little roller that engages the ratchet wheel to lock the lines in position; finally, all ribbon-spool shafts and gear shafts . . .” Anyway, I did not burn the book, and later I was standing barefoot at the kitchen counter and grinding carrots for you, my little one, when Gil Hanover came from next door with ink on his hands looking for Roman. He said he was thinking about an easel that would fold out of the wall somehow. I showed him in the little book how seltzer could be used to remove ink, and I showed him the picture of the woman who had sewn herself to the arm of the chair. He said that the only solution would be for her to take t
he dress off, and then he got embarrassed, he even blushed, the blood rose wonderfully to his ears, and I gave him one very small kiss, and he asked if I would like to pose for a painting. So you see that it was my mistake, and whatever you hear about the way things happened, from whomever you hear it, you must know, my love, the mistake belongs to me. The Hanover family has taken too much grief from this town, and if I leave no other impression, let me say they are people like any other who have been bestowed by the accident of God with all sorts of cash.
You may ask where your father was when all this was happening. Florida, sometimes. One of his clients was putting up an enormous house on the island of Captiva. The trim alone took a year because the client insisted that the woodwork depict scenes from Florida history and that these carvings be rendered by Roman and no one else. This was fine with Roman. In his mind, he had been gone from Ashland for a long time, and to make the withdrawal physical while also having his artistry recognized was just the thing he was after. He knew that the client considered him a backwoods craftsman, and he had to make his style cruder, but that was a small price to pay for the project at hand. The house was finished last year, and Roman came home looking very old to me. With him he brought model airplanes, money, and a suitcase full of marijuana, which he sold for a good profit, using the money to cut down trees for air space to fly his planes in. He did not care about Gilbert’s paintings of me. Or if he did, he didn’t say so. Our relationship lasted one year, stopping only when Gilbert’s wife threatened to pull her money from the bobbin company as it stood poised for conversion to a maker of modern fasteners instead of the futureless sewing machine parts. “People don’t sew the way they used to,” Gilbert would say, “but there will always be a need for fasteners.” I felt bad for Gilbert’s children, and I knew that I was eroding my credibility as a teacher. I knew it very well. But the summers are so hot and still here. Sometimes the lake sits for hours with nothing moving on the surface. You get to wishing even a leaf would fall on the water.
The letter did not seem to be over — it ended at the bottom of a page and there was no closing — but Paul could not find more pages. As he thumbed through the worn and yellowed papers, Rudolph Bonner came in and suggested a game of bumper pool. Paul played with an empty feeling that made his game much better than it would have been otherwise. He could not think of anything that remained to be found out except the whereabouts of the daughter, and his shooting was instinctive and true. But the old lawyer was very good. After all, it was his table, and he was a master of the carom.
“Where would I find Kim Tallis?” said Paul.
Rudolph Bonner peered down the length of the cue. “I’ll ask around.”
Paul and Alice’s affair might have been over. It would have been a natural time for it to end. Instead, in April, they went away for a weekend on the New Hampshire coast. Alice had told Loom that she was going to a conference of municipalities.
Paul parked his car, and he and Alice walked through the rain to a hotel across the road from the ocean. The hotel was a modern concrete building with brass lanterns on either side of the front door. A staircase climbed to the lobby, and at the top of the stairs there was a small bar where they ordered grass-flavored vodka and talked about whether to go ahead with what they were clearly going to go ahead with. Soon they were kissing in full view of half a dozen jaded but interested customers. Then they realized that they had forgot protection, and they went out to a vast supermarket with a pharmacy, a bookstore, a coffee bar, and a travel agency. It was seven o’clock, dark, and still raining, and a neon light blinked off and on in no evident rhythm above the bright and colorful condom display. Speakers played music, announced discounts, and relayed obviously counterfeit messages summoning security guards to the main floor of what was obviously a one-story building. Paul considered the talismanic power of condoms. If they bought them, he and Alice would make love; if not, not; and he had the strange impression that the latex prophylactics were calling the shots. Meanwhile, the music playing in the supermarket changed from an instrumental version of “Smoke on the Water” to an instrumental version of “Stop! In the Name of Love.” That this song should be playing at this moment seemed incredible to Paul, but he knew that they were not going to stop — not for love, not for any reason.
If anything, he thought, love was a reason not to stop, and maybe he had known this all along.
They returned to the hotel, where the clerk gave them a key to a room on the seventh floor. Paul turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open, but someone had already taken possession of the room and left it an impressive mess. Clothes and newspapers covered the furniture, suitcases lay open-mouthed on the floor, and a pair of pants that looked big enough for both of them sprawled across the bed. The large pants had an obscene and elusive quality. It was as if the room contained the ugly mechanics of the lies they would tell, and the lies were large, with large pants.
They laughed nervously and went back down in the elevator. “Someone’s already taken that room,” said Alice.
“An obese man,” said Paul.
“I apologize on behalf of the hotel,” said the clerk. He glanced about and brought from under the counter a red velvet box from which he produced a golden key. “This,” he said quietly, “will open what is surely the finest room in the hotel, with perhaps the most comprehensive view of the sea.”
“I like this hotel,” said Paul.
“Do I know you?” said the clerk.
Paul said he didn’t.
The second room was on the corner of the ninth floor. Six windows looked out on the ocean, each in a narrow alcove above a bench seat, and through streaks of rain they could see the lighted shoreline. They put their bags down and Alice called the desk. “Please send up candles, extra pillows, and something good to drink,” she said.
“You order well,” said Paul.
“It’s my hobby.”
“I always think I should be serving them.”
“What kind of hotel would that be?”
“It would be different,” said Paul. “I guess it’s because I’ve been on the other side of the desk, and I know what the staff thinks.”
“Which is what?”
“Oh, you know. That the customers are frivolous deviants. That they’re wastrels.”
“I don’t think I should like going to your hotel.”
Paul smiled, for with this mild argument their relationship seemed to be moving on to the next plane. “We’re not usually overbooked,” he said.
They lit the candles and drank from narrow glasses. Alice wore a soft faded nightgown and slouched charmingly in a window seat with her black hair falling down her back.
“We might have ended up together,” said Paul.
“You don’t have to say that.”
20
The water looked rough and green as glass in the morning. Alice drew her knees under her nightgown and rested her forehead on her hands. “I woke up and cried,” she said. “I felt awfully alone last night about three. I replayed everything I’ve done wrong to the kids. I’ve been mean to Chester. I let Faith go outside when she was only two years old and it was too cold. I’ve neglected them by being here with you. This weekend they’re with Loom’s mother, who hates them. She braids Faith’s hair so tight it pulls her eyes back.”
They left the hotel around eleven o’clock and found two men in tan trenchcoats waiting on the sidewalk. Paul knew one of the men, Ivan Montgomery, but not the other.
“Go back inside,” he said to Alice.
The men steered him toward a big white Oldsmobile parked by a lobster restaurant. Paul broke from their grip and ran into the restaurant. He entered the kitchen, where he found a maze of silver cooking machines and two cooks in T-shirts and white hats. “Where is the back way?” he said.
“What?” said one of the cooks.
“I’m being chased. Where’s the back way?”
“Do you mean the pantry?”
“The back way, for Christ’s sake, the — the back door.”
“I don’t know that there is a back door,” said the cook. “But who you should ask is Alf. Because I’ve only been here two weeks. Alfie, Alfie, this guy is looking for the back door. Says somebody’s after him.”
Alf stirred a big bowl of dough. He glanced at Paul. “We’re not really open,” he said. “There used to be a back door, but they bricked it up when they redid the place.”
“A closet,” said Paul. “A crawl space.” Then Ivan Montgomery and the unknown man found their way into the kitchen. One took Paul by the arm and swung him into the side of a refrigerator. The cooks picked up their spatulas and moved away from the violence. The two men brought Paul out through the empty restaurant and shoved him into the back seat of the Olds.
Ivan did the driving. He was a short, thick-chested man with a birthmark over his eye. The other man leaned his head back and went to sleep.
“Who’s your friend, Ivan?” said Paul.
“A young guy, name of Bodoni,” said Ivan. “He’s got an interesting style which people mistake for him being slow-witted. But actually I think he’s going to be very good one day. He’ll go farther than I have, and that’s all right. I’m not looking for the high-pressure situations anymore. Just collecting doomed losers like you is fine with me. Me and Cathy got a kid now. It rearranges your point of view.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” said Paul. “So what’s going to happen?”
“You mean with schools?” said Ivan. “My mother’s really pushing for Sacred Heart, but there’s supposed to be an excellent Montessori nearby. So we’ll see. I mean, there’s no rush, the boy’s only three. Still, they say you have to plan far in advance. That’s how come you can’t get out back there. Child-lock doors,”