Keeper of the Children

by William H Hallahan

  To Benson their faces were becoming distinct this second time: he recognized the two black youths and the boy with the pimples and another with a tambourine, the hint of a beard in front of his ears and a tattoo on the lower right arm—a heart with a knife through it. Benson wondered which one was Professor Hawthorn’s son.

  At the rear walked the other young mother, Renni at her side, carrying the baby for her. The sight of Renni with a baby in her arms stunned him. He remembered his wife’s fears.

  Benson quickly stepped from the grassy square down brick steps to the sidewalk and waited for them. Custis’s son marched by with his head up, slapping the two ends of the drum. His blond hair lay on his forehead under a conical straw hat and his glasses were missing, giving his expression a perpetual squint. His face revealed nothing, not pleasure or pain, knowledge or ignorance. Dr. Sing’s daughter passed by, so close to Benson that he could see the rain captured in her long black hair. The boys passed by, indifferent to him, giving off a faint odor of damp wool and curry.

  As Renni approached him, he saw an empty taxicab moving along the wet street, parallel to Renni. The idea formed in Benson’s mind in an instant: open the cab door and shove Renni in. In three or four more steps she’d be up to him, the cab door, swinging open, would block her way. A push—an easy push—and they’d both be in the cab on the way home.

  Benson stepped to the gutter and started to extend his hand toward the cab door. Renni, unaware, was closer, the baby in a sling around her neck, her two arms protectively wrapped around his body, his head in an infant’s rain cap bobbing above her immature breasts. Benson hesitated; how was he to get Renni without the baby? He waited too long.

  Renni, preoccupied, head down in the drizzle, softly walked into her father and stepped back. For an instant he’d had his arm around both her and the baby. His hands had felt the wet saffron blanket on her back, felt her soft flesh and the slight shoulder bones. She held the baby tight and stared at her father, speechless. The cab rolled by.

  The group reacted quickly, in practiced manner. As Renni drew back from him, he heard Pammy’s squeals of protest and saw her running at him while the rest of them hurried across the street and away from him. In a moment Pammy was between Benson and Renni, pushing her toward the street.

  The boys, gathered along the curb across the street, were watching. The Custis boy stood facing the wall of the office building, relentlessly thumping his drum like a wind-up toy.

  Renni had reached the other side of the street when Pammy turned back to Benson.

  “Leave us alone! You tell my parents there’ll be more trouble like last night if they don’t mind their own business. We know what you’re doing. Leave us alone!”

  She ran across the street and hurried Renni along the walk. One of the girls turned to the Custis boy and shook his arm. He followed after her, beating his drum, eyes squinting, mouth open as though catching the drizzle.

  They moved toward the corner, a colorful discord in the gray day. At the corner Renni turned and paused to look at Benson before passing out of sight. The loss seemed irrevocable.

  Benson stood on the sidewalk, still smelling the odor of damp blanketing and curry, still feeling the soft small shoulder bones in his hands, now as empty as the street.

  Garman hailed a cab on Market Street.

  Now that he’d decided to go, returning to his home to pack struck him as a great inconvenience. He considered going directly to the airport and buying whatever he needed in Bermuda. But he had several hours before flight time, and the daylight reassured him: he decided to go home and pack.

  The cab let him off at the Suburban Station, where he took the Main Line train. He collected his car at the train stop, drove the winding, tree-lined street and pulled up at his driveway.

  He’d had a lot of unhappiness in that house, a lot of frustration and battles with his screaming, hysterical daughter. In his heart he would always carry a picture of Pammy’s big mouth and the sound of a door slamming. He should never have listened to Cecelia; they were well rid of the brat; why had he gotten involved with the committee? Now he was on the run for his life. His rage was, however, eased by the thought of Bermuda … without Cecelia to cramp his style.

  The hell with everyone, he was going to have a good time. He unlocked the front door and entered the house.

  Cecelia’s cat came bawling up to him about something, and he hurried around her, up the stairs to the bedroom.

  He got out his leather suitcase and his leather garment carrier and his leather toilet kit, put them on the unmade bed and began to pack. Two of his suits needed cleaning—something he would attend to in Bermuda—and several shirts were in the laundry hamper. He balled them and stuffed them into the suitcase. He flipped his toilet articles from the bathroom cabinet into the case and zipped it, located his shorts and golf shoes and packed them. Finally, he flipped through his credit cards in his wallet and began to go through his mental checklist. Golf cap: he found it in the linen closet.

  Cecelia’s cat sat in the doorway and watched. She bawled at him again.

  Garman picked up the suitcase, slung the garment bag over his shoulder and went downstairs. He opened the closet door, extracted his golf bag and slung it over his shoulder. He paused as he turned to close the front door and looked back inside the house.

  “Made it,” he said. In a short time he’d be safe. At least, he wouldn’t be killed in that house.

  In the window the cat’s mouth mewed for him to come back.

  At first, Benson was too busy to think.

  He sorted the pile of receipts by weeks and within each week by days, and then, with the help of his secretary and his day journal, began the slow process of accounting, item by item, for all the money he’d spent during the two-month trip—laundry, hotel, meals, transportation, gratuities, laundry, hotel, meals, transportation, gratuities. He hated it.

  He was, at the same time, issuing instructions to the production people on processing the film and ordering a moviola for viewing. Then there were the preparation of the sound track, the voice-overs, the music to be discussed. Heads leaned into his office: “What studio is doing the tracks?” “What did you do with the vouchers?” “You have a copy of the original estimates?”

  Periodically he recalled the night before—a violently interruptive memory that made the expense-accounting seem absurd. He wondered how Dr. Sing was faring. He looked irritably at the phone. He wanted Kheim bound, gagged and air-freighted to Asia. Now.

  He sat at his desk, eating a sandwich gone soggy and drinking coffee gone cold and watching the drizzle and the mist soak his window, overlooking the trees down in the square waving smeared points of faint green that promised better days ahead. He wished Dr. Sing would call.

  The hotel bill from St. Rémy de Provence and a violent murder lay juxtaposed in his mind, each canceling out the reality of the other.

  Smooth warm hands reached from behind and covered his eyes. “Want to come up and see my etchings, love?” asked a soft voice. If nothing else, the scent told him who it was.

  “Not unless you get all those cameras out of your bed.”

  “Cameras are a girl’s best friend.” Rita poked him lightly on the shoulder. “This trip to Africa is going to put you on the map. Everyone is going to know who you are after this. I saw the story boards. At least five gold medals there.”

  “Six.”

  “I thought I’d find you dancing on the desk.”

  “Well, sure I am. See?”

  “But.”

  “But what?”

  “I smell a ‘but’ in there somewhere.”

  “Oh, no. There’s no but for Africa. I’ve got a big but at home. My kid checked out.”

  “The girl? What’s her name—Renni?”

  He nodded.

  “So? Didn’t you ever run away? I did, lots of times.”

  “Her timing is lousy.”

  “Timing is always lousy, ducks. There’s never going to be the per
fect time to go to Africa, or anyplace else. Either there’s some trouble at home or in the office, or the equipment isn’t right or it’s the rainy season or the dry season—bad timing goes with the territory, doesn’t it? I mean, what are you going to do? Quit because your kid ran away?”

  She watched him for a moment, then lit a cigarette. “Eddie, come on. You’re a pro. You go to Africa when it’s time to go to Africa. You can’t go home like Job and crawl into the fireplace”—she smiled at him—“pouring ashes on your head, waiting for your kid to come home. Forget it, kids are tougher than you think. It’ll all blow over and she’ll come home when she’s good and ready.”

  Memory leafed through a family photo album, elbowing him at each page. Here’s Renni at her birthday party. She was six. And here’s Renni with her birthday cake, holding Top in her lap. He was just one. And here’s a new picture for your mental album: Renni in the rain in a wet saffron gown, age fourteen, holding another baby, not Top, in a sling.

  Rita waited for a reaction. “Forget it, Eddie,” she said finally. “Cheer up.”

  It was a bee.

  The first of the year and very early: it must have strayed from a hive somewhere, and there it was, crawling on her kitchen windowpane. Then it flew away and Susan Benson wished it good luck.

  It had evoked a memory—of other bees who had brought her good luck on another day.

  Not long after they met, Eddie had taken her on a picnic in a cranky car with a bad clutch that he borrowed from his brother. They drove out of the city into a soft afternoon in September and parked in a rutted lane between crumbling, half-fallen stone walls by an abandoned peach orchard. The air was heavy with the sweet odor of overripe peaches, loud with clouds of humming bees. And they walked up the lane under trees in spangled sunlight.

  He was covered with sun coins. Looking at him, she decided to risk it. Against best advice, she would not wait any longer: she would claim him before someone else did. She would take his hand and say “I love you” and not let his hand go. Before she could say it, though, he smiled at her and took her hand. Astonished, she walked beside him, holding his hand and waiting for him to speak. He didn’t.

  There was a driveway through the old wall; they turned there into an old track that lead into a brilliantly sunlit meadow. They walked through grass that had gone to hay: beards of seeds waved knee-high in the bright autumn air. At the edge of the meadow under high trees stood a handsome weatherboard house with gables. Eddie spread a blanket.

  “But,” she protested, “the people—” pointing to the house.

  “Away,” he said and sat down on the blanket.

  She ate an egg-salad sandwich and idly studied the house. A large chimney nearly covered one end of the building, which, she decided, must have at least three fireplaces. The windows were all oversize, eight- and twelve-paned to admit more light.

  Still eating her sandwich, Susan wondered aloud what the owner and his family were like.

  “Old,” said Eddie, “Old and grouchy.”

  “Oh, no. Young. And the house is filled with sunlight. See? And plants. And love. And happiness.”

  “They keep vicious dogs that bite people.”

  “Stop it, Eddie,” she said. “It’s my dream. They have enough money and good friends and wonderful happy children and a cat that’s always pregnant and a big dog with a wet nose.”

  Eddie lay back and sighed. “And a mortgage and leaky pipes and all this grass to cut.”

  She ignored him. She lay on the blanket and stared at the sky until it began to spin while she pictured life in the house, ice-skating and fires in the winter, strawberries in the spring, and vivid autumns. She tried to picture the rooms and began to decorate them. She sat up.

  “I wonder,” she said to his dozing face, “what it looks like inside.”

  “Why don’t you go see? Nobody’s home.” His eyes were still shut as she stood up. Then he opened one. “Here,” he said, “take this with you.” He sat up, reached into the picnic basket and pulled out a small box.

  Opening it, she found a key attached by frayed string to an old key ring. She stared at him. She felt embarrassed, knowing that her face had gone all blotchy.

  She sat down on the blanket for a minute for fear her legs might fail her and then, resolutely, she stood up and walked through the tall grass, scattering bees and butterflies in the sunlight. Her hand trembled too much and the key didn’t fit the lock after all, and now she was covered—smothered—with embarrassment because she’d misunderstood him and he hadn’t meant that the key was for the front door. And then she tried the key again with two hands and it fit.

  She pushed the door open to a sun-filled central hallway with wide stairs and random-width floorboards. She could see more sun on the upper landing. Against the newel post of the doorway leaned a sign with dirt stuck to the point of its shaft where it had just been pulled out of the ground. It said: “House for Sale.” And she stood in the doorway in the sunlight with the breeze stirring her hair and she looked, immobilized, at the key on the string, afraid to believe what it obviously meant: it was tied, she now realized, not to an old key ring but to an old wedding ring.

  When he came up to her in the doorway, it was he who said it first. “I love you, Sue.”

  She stood by her kitchen window wondering if the bee had come from across the old wall in the abandoned peach orchard. The phone rang.

  “Sue?”

  “Hi.”

  “Pack some clothes for a few days for the three of us and go to your mother’s apartment. Do it right now. Just lock up the house and don’t tell any of the neighbors where you’re going. Okay?”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Nothing. Just to play safe.”

  “Eddie. Should I be scared?”

  She heard him sigh, “I’m not sure yet.”

  She stood by the kitchen phone and listened for the familiar sounds of her house. It was silent, but the silence wasn’t tranquil. It was the silence of stealth: for the first time she sensed menace in her home.

  She called her mother, then started packing. Eddie’s suitcase first, then Top’s, last her own. Quickly she watered all her plants and toured the windows, checking the locks and drawing some of the curtains. She considered the dog, Swaggers, for a moment, then decided he would be safe in his doghouse until tomorrow when she could make other arrangements.

  After loading the three suitcases in the trunk of the car, she returned to the front hallway to pull the door shut. As she did, she looked at the key in her hand. She was unable to move: memory struck like a sharp pain.

  She couldn’t leave her house. This was her wedding present from Eddie, this was where she began her marriage, where she conceived and bore her children. This was sanctuary.

  This was also the house that Renni would come home to; she mustn’t return to find an empty, locked house.

  To stay meant to keep the vigil for Renni; it meant hope. To go meant to help protect Eddie. The strands of love pulled at her two ways: she was unable to choose. She stood twisting the antique wedding ring Eddie had put on her finger sixteen years before.

  At last she took resolution. She wanted it all; not Eddie without Renni; not Renni without Eddie. She would have it all—somehow, she would fight for it all.

  “I’ll be back,” she said aloud to the house. “I promise we’ll all be back.”

  As she drove the car down the road between the old stone walls, past the peach orchard with their bare limbs, silence and solitude once again enclosed the house as they had sixteen years before.

  Cecelia Garman returned to a dark house—and immediately remembered Eddie Benson’s warning.

  In the bar, after Harry left, Eddie Benson had still been sitting in the booth when she returned from the ladies’ room.

  “Go to a motel tonight,” he’d said. “Don’t go home.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t go back there,” she said. “What’s the difference? We’re not a threat to him anymore. None
of us are.” She poked her thumb and forefinger into her gin to get the olive. Straight gin with an olive and ice was what she called a very dry martini on the rocks. The sunglasses had slipped down on her nose and she peered over the top at him with her red eyes. “Anyway, I couldn’t go with him to Bermuda.” She took in the olive, then kissed her finger-tips.

  “I have to leave,” said Benson.

  “Aren’t you going to have lunch? They have wonderful hot roast beef sandwiches—”

  “Thanks. I’m not hungry. Do what I told you. Go to a motel tonight. All the best people are doing it.”

  She smiled at him. It was a real smile, and it made her look younger. Benson realized that she was very pretty—or had been.

  “You have a very nice daughter, Mr. Benson. I had hoped that she’d help Pammy, because Pammy’s been ruined. She’s been hit too much. She’s filled with anger. Well, forget it. It’ll all work out, they say.”

  “Take care of yourself.”

  “I’ll do it.” As he was leaving, she ordered another very dry martini.

  She’d sat the whole afternoon away, drinking and smoking and waiting for five o’clock. At five she moved to Fortunato’s Place and sat with a drink by the window and watched.

  At last they came, thumping the drum, dancing with the cymbals and tambourines. They didn’t look happy to her, despite the singing and dancing. She heard Pammy’s nasty, raucous laugh before her daughter finally hove into view, shoving her clinking beggar’s bowl at the passersby.

  She was tempted to go and speak to her, but she was in no mood for scornful anger. She was, she knew, what Pammy had called her many times: an idiot. She should have broken up with her husband long before. But, bad as her own life had been, when she thought of the life ahead for Pammy she felt despair.

  Renni appeared next, guileless and cheerful—or was she a bit pensive? She carried a baby in a sling. Renni was so much more like the daughter Cecelia Garman had always wanted: the thought made her feel sufficiently guilty to order another martini.