House of Secrets - v4

by Richard Hawke

  Of particular bewilderment to Andy was an out-of-town encounter with a friend of Jenny Hoyt’s, no less. Extremely reckless, the incident had occurred during a never-fully-investigated rough patch with Christine. Happily for Andy, the woman’s husband had taken a job in San Francisco, a tidy continent away.

  His only real affair prior to Joy Resnick had taken place during Andy’s first senatorial campaign, the same year that Christine’s brother died and that Whitney and Lillian had returned from London to see their floundering marriage carom into the final wall. A bad year for the family. The woman was a journalist with The Washington Post, and the genesis of the affair had been the sort of joshing and flattering attention that was common in many of Andy’s interactions with people. In the case of Rita Flores, Andy would have characterized his attentions as “flirting without intent” — that is, until the moment the candidate had found himself entangled with the fiery reporter in the back of a limousine on the way to her Arlington apartment. The fact that Andy had allowed his bantering friendship with the journalist to develop into a full-blown affair had surprised him, and he had sworn to himself — and asserted to Rita Flores — that his behavior with her represented no judgment whatsoever on the state of his feelings toward his wife and his marriage. In fact, Andy felt — but did not share with the journalist — that his tryst with her shined a bright beacon of affirmation on his and Christine’s relationship. Nifty trick, that one. But both during and especially after every sexual encounter with Rita Flores, Andy had found his mind (or was it his heart?) inundated with loving images of Christine, along with internal voices confirming that his sexual compatibility with his wife absolutely trumped the gymnastic session just concluded with the aggressive Ms. Flores. His and Christine’s pillow talk was certainly far superior. Plus there was an edge to Rita Flores that had never really agreed with Andy, a small hardness in the woman when it came to considering the circumstances and conditions of others. Christine had none of that. Her heart was always on the side of the other. Andy would drift off to sleep after every encounter with Rita Flores convinced yet again that Christine was his one and only. A semantic minefield that Andy would forever have to wander alone.

  Andy snapped out of his reverie. Christine was calling out to him from over by one of the wickets.

  “And you stay in that chair until you’re good and ready to apologize, do you hear me?”

  She was standing next to the tedious ad exec who had been drooling all over her at lunch. A Greenwich action figure if ever there was one: the pale yellow slacks, sky blue Lacoste shirt, northbound hairline. In the instant of looking over at the two of them, the image of the ad exec climbing atop Christine in some hotel room flashed through Andy’s mind. Jesus God, he thought, give the poor woman more credit than that.

  Andy called back. “Whatever it was, I swear I won’t do it again!”

  Christine laughed. “If I can’t forgive you on Easter, then when can I forgive you?”

  Andy’s glass was empty. He pushed himself out of the tiny chair and went inside for a freshener. Once there he decided against it. Instead, he went into the living room and dropped onto the green leather couch. He realized he was exhausted. The doctor had warned him about this, the possibility of sudden fatigue. Andy felt as if his bones and muscles had turned to water.

  The Sunday Times was on the coffee table. The front page was dominated by the news — if that’s what it could really be called — of Vice President Wyeth’s growing difficulties. Andy had glanced at the paper that morning, primarily to see if his name had cropped up in any speculative sense concerning the crisis. It hadn’t. From outside, the sounds of raised voices and agitation drifted into the room, but Andy’s focus was elsewhere. His eyes ran across the newspaper like a pair of lasers. Over the three days since his stealth exit from Shelter Island, he had done his best to keep away from any coverage of the horrible bludgeoning death of the attractive thirty-four-year-old public relations executive at her family’s beach house on Shelter Island. Andy knew this behavior was the same as poking his head into the sand. If I don’t see it or hear about it, it didn’t happen. Thankfully, the growing press interest in the vice president’s situation had kept the story buried more deeply than it might have normally been.

  But there it was, in the local section: Joy’s face, alongside the article about her murder and its investigation. Tears rushed to his eyes when he read that Joy was to be buried the following day. He dabbed away the moisture and continued to scan the article. Now that he had lifted his head momentarily from the sand, there was a specific piece of information he was anxious to find out. In his heart, he already knew it. Unless the Suffolk County police had been trained at Ringling’s Clown College, surely they would have figured this one out.

  And yes, there it was.

  …authorities are seeking at least two men in connection with the public relations executive’s murder. Aside from the evidence of forced entry by way of the bedroom’s rear door additional evidence suggests the presence in the bedroom with Ms. Resnick of a second individual. Police have collected blood and hair samples and are…

  “Andy?”

  Andy’s head jerked up from the paper. Christine and Michelle were standing in the doorway. They both looked miserable. All the lift in Christine’s face was gone; her eyes looked haunted. Michelle looked even worse. She was crying uncontrollably, her tears trailing down alongside her sniveling nose.

  Andy’s stomach clenched. They know.

  He released the paper and rose dreamily to his feet. His knees didn’t want to work properly. He felt as if the world outside the windows was spinning at blurring speed.

  Michelle croaked, “Daddy.”

  Christine took a deep breath, closing her eyes for an instant. She looked as if tears were on her way, too. Here it comes, Andy thought. The future is a complete void.

  “Doc is dead. He just collapsed.”

  Andy heard the words. But their meaning did not immediately register. Someone opened the sliding glass door in the kitchen and Andy became aware of the uptick in agitated noise from the backyard.

  Michelle came running toward him. Andy released his breath, not even aware until that moment that he had been holding it. As he stepped forward and opened his arms to receive his bereft little girl, he felt a twinge in his stomach.

  It was a most hateful twinge.

  It was relief.

  Robert Smallwood knew a thing or two about angels.

  As a child, he resembled an angel, or at least according to his mother he did. A large and doughy child, his wide, cornflower-blue eyes seemed to cover half his face. His slightly oversize head was perfectly round — like a pumpkin — and his hair remained fair and silky, soft ringlets that circled his scalp not unlike a halo.

  By the time of his sixth birthday, Robbie Smallwood had amply accustomed himself to the winged creatures, having by then already visited New York City’s veritable warehouse of angels — the Metropolitan Museum of Art — many dozens of times with his mother. For nearly a year leading up to that birthday, Robbie and his mother had engaged in a weekly ritual of visiting the museum every Wednesday afternoon. Tartly done up and with a smart little hat on her head, Vivien Smallwood would usher her son and his sketchbook to the museum’s grand second-floor galleries and their scores of paintings that were crammed full with pink, dwarfish angels. Robbie was completely enthralled with the creatures. Their opaque, disconnected expressions. Their puckered limbs and pink-blushed skin. They hovered about on the canvases like little plump bumblebees.

  Robbie’s “special place” was the lacquered bench directly in front of Lorenzo Lotto’s Venus and Cupid. Vivien Smallwood would park her son on the bench, give him a lingering kiss on the cheek, then disappear, flashing a smile at the ash-haired security guard who patrolled the galleries as she hurried off to the exit.

  The painting was a complete wonder to the boy. Venus and Cupid. Each time he saw it, he was confounded anew. The angel in the painting was
peeing on that naked lady. Actually peeing. A filament of liquid, clear as could be, arched from the cherub’s pudgy little penis on its way to the lady’s stomach. The lady herself — Venus — was also pink and quite fleshy, and thoroughly unashamed. More than that, she looked amused, reclining on the ground atop a gray blanket, one hand lightly brushing a swelling breast while this little winged urchin urinated on her belly! Robbie was enthralled by the look of coquettish mirth on the woman’s face. Could she actually be enjoying this? Was she encouraging the imp to debase her in this way? Over the hour and a half of his mother’s absence, Robbie sat on the wooden bench, scratching away feverishly in his sketchbook. Over the woman’s head dangled a conch shell. Its pink, shellacked lip curved back in a fashion that Robbie instinctively found disturbing. Even more than the rest of the inscrutable painting, it was the spiral shell that burned itself onto Robbie’s inner eye. His sketchbook was choked with his artless attempts to reproduce the incongruous mollusk. Each failed attempt — and there were hundreds of them — bore the concluding strokes of the boy’s final frustration, the mean, jagged scratchings-over of his fat black pencil.

  His mother’s return was always punctual. Hearing the click, click, click of her heels on the parquet floor as she approached, Robbie would close his messy sketchbook and slide off the bench, bracing himself for the oversize hug.

  “My angel!”

  The security guard tended to regard Vivien Smallwood coolly as the two hurried from the gallery, though Robbie’s mother never seemed to notice. Robbie noticed. He could read the man’s expression. The guard was not impressed with his mother. Robbie could see that the old black man thought there was something distasteful about her.

  And always the routine.

  “I hope he was an angel.”

  “Oh yes ma’am, he was. I’m expecting those wings of his to start pop-pin’ out any old day now.”

  She couldn’t see it. The man was mocking her.

  Robbie Smallwood had prayed like the devil for those wings to make their appearance. Straining as hard as he could, he used to imagine that he could actually feel them trying to break through the skin just below his shoulders. It was several weeks before his sixth birthday when his father caught him one morning standing stark naked on a chair in front of the bathroom mirror, twisting his body to get a better look at the reflection of his back. His father’s abrupt entrance into the room took the boy by surprise, and he let out a cry as he half-leaped, half-fell from the stool. His father beat him. To Robbie’s horror, his bladder released during the beating, some of the stream spraying onto his father’s trousers. The anointing further enraged his father, and in due course a trickle of blood began running from one of Robbie’s ears.

  The day after Robbie’s beating was a Wednesday. But there was no visit to see the angels. Instead, his mother remained in her bed all morning and into the afternoon, weeping copiously. Robbie slipped into the room silently and sat and watched. He was fascinated, though not especially moved. He had never really noticed before how his mother was also a little soft herself, in the same fashion as the Venus lady in the painting at the museum. He left the room once, to go fetch his sketchbook, then returned and sat in the chair working on his endless conch shells. Eventually, his mother’s weeping subsided somewhat and she noticed her son seated across the room. She summoned him to the bed; dutifully he came to her. She wrapped the boy in her fleshy arms and told him in a soft cooing voice what a bad, bad man his father was. How mean. And how ugly. Robbie didn’t disagree. His father was bad. But so was his mother. The both of them were ugly and foul. Robbie marveled that he could be the child of such people. He nestled in closer to his pathetic mother. She was as pliant as the pillows. Her milky skin was clammy. He felt as if he could sink deeply into it. Vile. Finally, his mother fell asleep, and soon after, so did Robbie. His dreams were black and bloody.

  His dates with the angels had ended.

  Robert Smallwood leaned down to plant a kiss on his aunt’s cheek. The cheek was wet with the poor woman’s tears. The light tang of salt transferred to Smallwood’s lips.

  “Oh, Robbie. Our Joy. I just don’t understand the world we live in anymore. A beautiful young woman like that. My God, what in the world do you…?”

  If she even actually knew her question, she was unable to line up the words to complete it. Smallwood took his aunt’s small hand in his own — the very hand that had delivered the necessary blows to Cousin Joy — and massaged her knuckles gently. What could he say to his aunt?

  She deserved it.

  The world is better off.

  He remained mute. His aunt used her captured hand to lead Smallwood over to the pair of easels near the foot of the closed casket. The easels were covered with photographs depicting Joy Resnick on her thirty-four-year journey from birth to death. Smallwood released his aunt’s moist hand while he gazed at the photographs. It was all there. Baby Joy. Little girl Joy. Elementary school Joy. Teen Joy. College Joy. First real job Joy.

  Whore Joy.

  Smallwood moved closer to the casket. He placed his fingers on the lid and let them travel lightly along the wood as he stepped toward the head of the box.

  She was there. Mere inches below his hand. Sweet. Dead. Joy.

  Later, Smallwood parked himself against the wall to observe Cousin Joy’s former colleagues, who had turned out in full force. Joy’s boss was among the mourners, an imposing bald man in an elegant smoke-colored suit. He was holding forth to a semicircle of sycophants, going on and on about Joy this and Joy that. The man was all praise and bullshit. But he was not the one who had been with Joy that night on Shelter Island. He was too tall. And the man with Joy had not been bald. He thought, He fucked her, too. Smug, owl-headed hustler. Big bald cootch-sniffing prick.

  Smallwood inventoried Joy’s other colleagues to see if any of the men showed signs of a recent wicked encounter with an iron pipe. None of them did. Smallwood knew for a fact that his blows would have required medical attention. Most likely there’d been stitches. None of these particular cretins appeared to have so much as a scratch on them.

  As he stood looking over the gathering, Smallwood’s eye snagged on a smallish woman who was standing off — seemingly by herself — near the rear of the room. She was somewhere in her mid- to upper twenties, with short bangs, thick dark eyebrows, and a quite complicated pair of eyeglasses, architecturally speaking. The eyewear seemed to be a statement, though Smallwood wasn’t sure what the statement was. She was an odd duck. There was an anxious quality coming off her. Smallwood could practically smell it. Her small, pouty mouth was drenched in fire-engine-red lipstick, and behind her mad glasses her eyes seemed to be in continuous motion, deliberately surveying the other people in the room in much the way Smallwood was doing. Smallwood moved away from the wall and traveled slowly around the room, purposefully passing several times near the woman. Each time he sensed her roving eyes landing on him, he felt as if her gaze was crawling over him like worms.

  Fascinating.

  It was raining like mad. Despite the tarp affixed over the mound of earth next to Joy’s grave, the pounding rain was having its way. Streams of chocolate-colored mud ran freely into the waiting grave.

  A dozen folding chairs had been set up under a white canopy, sitting unevenly on the lumpy Astroturf carpet. Smallwood sat awkwardly in his chair, his legs overflowing the small plastic seat. He would have preferred to stand out in the rain, but Aunt Judy wanted him under the canopy, next to his grandmother. Doris Smallwood, in her early eighties and nearly as large as Robert, sat silent and sour through the entire service. If Smallwood felt like a giant in the wobbly chair, he suspected his grandmother did as well. The elderly woman lived alone upstate and didn’t have much to do with the family these days. By all appearances, being forced to come down to attend her granddaughter’s funeral hadn’t done much to warm her heart up toward her kin.

  At the conclusion of the service, Smallwood’s aunt rose from her chair and was guided a
cross the lumpy ground by her son, Jeffrey, who handed her the rose she was to place on Joy’s casket. Smallwood’s eyes had remained glued on Our Lady of the Funky Glasses, who was standing along the edge of the gathering, staring a hole through the casket. The rain running off her umbrella reminded Smallwood of a curtain of cheap plastic beads. As he sat watching, a man stepped up unnoticed behind the woman, ducking past the rain-bead curtain and joining her under the umbrella. He was of medium height and weight and was wearing a knee-length olive-green coat and a brown floppy-brimmed hat pulled down low on his head.

  Smallwood’s whiskers twitched.

  The man had whispered something into the woman’s ear. She went rigid. Even behind her cagey lenses, the fear that came into the woman’s eyes was evident. The man continued to speak softly into her ear. Smallwood was certain the man must have told her not to turn around, but to remain facing forward. Was this him? Smallwood looked for signs of his handiwork on the man’s skull, but the hat was pulled down too far. Whoever he was, he seemed to have a lot to say. Aunt Judy had completed her rose tribute and Jeffrey was guiding her back to her chair. Smallwood had to shift in his seat to maintain his view of the curious couple. The way the man was keeping his eyes trained on the side of the woman’s face looked as if he wanted to see what her reaction was to his words. The woman nodded once. And then a second time. This seemed to be the desired response. He reached up with his hand and touched her lightly on the cheek, then backed away and disappeared into the light mist.