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Gossip of the Starlings

Page 13

by Nina de Gramont


  “I hope you would tell us, Catherine, if you knew where she was.”

  “Of course I would,” I said. And then added, a contrite offering, “I’m sure she’s all right.”

  “Why are you sure of that?”

  The conversational equivalent of a hopeful double take. I hated to shoot her down.

  “Just because,” I said.

  “I hope you’re right,” Mrs. Butterfield said, and I thought I heard the faintest hint of warning.

  “What was that,” my mother said, when I hung up. She followed me back to the dinner table. “Her child is missing?”

  I didn’t say anything, just took my seat.

  “Whose child is missing?” my father said.

  “The senator’s,” my mother said. Ordinarily she tried not to engage him, but the subject matter was too interesting to deflect conversation.

  My father snorted. “I’m surprised he even noticed she was gone,” he said. “He’s so busy breaking campaign promises.”

  I knew that my father, who always voted Republican, would relish Senator Butterfield’s turnabout. I also knew that it would have taken him days or weeks to notice if I myself were missing. And I thought that even with Senator Butterfield’s glory tainted, I would have preferred him to my own gray, disapproving, and distant father. For a brief second I imagined stealing out of the house and heading not to our barn, but to the Butterfield house in Georgetown—as if small, blonde me could ever occupy the gaping and charismatic space that Skye had left behind.

  “He might not have noticed,” I said, the closest thing to defiance I could muster. “It was her mother who called.”

  “What was it like, chérie?” my mother said. “Their house.”

  And I gave them a little gift, describing the rambling vastness of the Butterfields’ Cape house, the old hotel and the new ballroom, the screening room and the caretaker’s house next door. My mother had grown up in what she considered genteel poverty. One of her rare points of commonality with my father was an outsider’s fascination with wealth—even equal or less than their own.

  “Where does he get all this money?” my mother said. “Surely not from politics.”

  My father snorted again. “His father was a bootlegger,” he said, and went back to his beef bourguignonne.

  And despite the absolute falseness of that remark, I immediately incorporated it into what I knew about Skye’s family fortune. The more plausible things she’d told me about banks and investments and television stations flew out the window of my transient awareness. No matter how I disdained all my father’s attitudes and opinions, whenever I heard him make a statement like that, I always archived it in my mind as fact, even as I rolled my eyes and pushed my plate away, refusing to eat in his company.

  The food tasted better cold, anyway—hours later, out in the barn with Skye, where we lit candles despite the bales of hay, the stacks of straw, the roving tails of curious cats. Agreeing on the danger, we hesitated before continuing with our meal.

  “But it’s so beautiful,” Skye said. “Flickering against these wood walls, with all the snow outside.”

  And there went our worries, with the undeniable beauty of the flame-cast shadows.

  HERE IS WHERE police in three states searched for Skye: on the deserted campus of Esther Percy, in her dorm room and in mine. On Cape Cod, through the cavernous rooms of the Butterfield house, and just in case, through the caretaker’s house. They searched the campus of Devon, and they searched every room in Eleanor’s house and the outbuildings at Dumbarton Oaks. They didn’t arrive at my house until midmorning. By then, I had done an impressive job eliminating all traces of Skye from the barn and was occupied across town, jumping with Pippin in the indoor ring.

  The two police officers who came to our house barely began interviewing our startled maid when they were radioed by comrades attending a protest. Senator Butterfield’s daughter had been found, protesting with a local branch of Greenpeace. Chained to a northern red oak, purportedly the oldest tree in the state.

  “I HAD TO WEAR DEPENDS,” she told me later. “The woman who organized the whole thing, Angela, went to get the box of chains and stuff from her car. I went along to help her, and when I saw that package of Depends I turned away, all embarrassed, thinking I’d invaded her privacy. Then it hit me: they were mine! I almost backed out then and there. All I could think about was peeing in those diapers.”

  Fear of the diapers occupied the bulk of her hours chained to the tree. She didn’t worry about her parents—whether they might be searching for her, or worried. She didn’t worry about forthcoming consequences.

  “All I worried about was when I would have to pee. If I’d thought about it, I wouldn’t have had any fluids at all that morning, but for some stupid reason it never occurred to me. So I stood there waiting to have to pee, and when I did have to pee I thought about how if I held it too long, when I really had to pee I would probably have to pee twice. You know how that happens? And then I worried about the police, and how I would smell when they came to arrest me. I wondered if they would report it on the news, that Senator Butter-field’s daughter was arrested wearing a wet diaper.”

  The papers never had time to report Skye’s disappearance. Instead it was her protest. A television crew arrived to film Skye’s mother, stepping up to the tree and whispering fiercely. Skye still wore my woodsman coat—red and black checked. The actual woodsmen—waiting with their chainsaws—wore thick yellow slickers. Skye’s breath billowed out in excited puffs as she loudly insisted she would not unchain herself from the tree until her father himself arrived, to listen to her plea for the ancient forest.

  Susannah and I rode through the woods to watch the spectacle. In the swirl of the excitement, she couldn’t help but forgive my treachery, even though dinner with her father had been strange and stilted. “He wouldn’t talk about the coke at all. Like he wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened. But then after dinner the three of us went to the playground and smoked a joint. We sat on that rickety merry-go-round and lit up. It was the weirdest moment of my life.”

  “Did he bring any coke back?” I said.

  “I asked him,” Susannah said, “and he obviously thought I was insane.” She threw her voice far down into her diaphragm, mock deep. “Do you know what they do to drug smugglers in South America?” Returning to her normal voice, she looked sideways at me from under her velvet helmet and said, “Pussy.”

  We laughed, then rode quietly for a few minutes. “I’m sorry I didn’t come with you last night,” I said. “Skye can be very distracting.”

  Susannah shrugged, a more petulant gesture than she’d probably intended. And I knew that whatever anger she harbored was not directed at me, but at Skye.

  “This is the second time I’ve met Skye,” she said, as we urged the horses over the crisscross of fallen tree trunks. “First time, big drama. Second time, big drama. A lot of drama with this girl.”

  “Keeps things interesting,” I said.

  “I could do without that kind of interest.”

  “Skye’s all right,” I said. “She’s just going through some intense things right now.”

  From up above, hidden in a tall oak, came a mournful kind of cooing, loud and resonant. We both looked up.

  “Sounds like an owl,” she said, “but it’s a mourning dove.”

  We listened a minute, then pressed on, leaving the toneful music behind.

  “That’s the one thing I still love about my dad,” Susannah said. “Because of him, I know things like that. Birdcalls.”

  “Maybe we should visit him when we’re in Venezuela,” I said, suddenly wanting to see his transformation for myself.

  She shook her head. “No way. He’s this unknown quantity now. It’s not like when he was an investment banker who collected field guides. Now he’s this professional bird-watcher specializing in midlife crisis. I wouldn’t trust him not to make a pass at you or something.”

  My mind reeled at this concept
.

  “It was fun to get high with him,” she said, impervious to the deep creepiness of her suggestion. “But only in a trippy kind of way. I enjoy thinking about how much shit he’d be in if he were caught.”

  Through the next stand of trees, we could see the yellow coats of the wood crew and the bright lights of the television cameras.

  “Some people can’t help but pull you into their messes,” Susannah said, quietly—perhaps worried a broadcast microphone would pick up her voice.

  For some reason I thought of Drew and Skye on Cape Cod Bay. And I swear I would have told Susannah, if I didn’t think on some level she already knew. That the information would not surprise her in any useful way but just confirm her already dubious assumptions—about Skye, and Drew, and her father. About human nature and all its traitorous inclinations. It was true that I wanted to protect Skye from the maelstrom she might inspire in Susannah. But I also wanted to protect Susannah from the same dangerous vortex.

  We bent our heads to duck under low-hanging branches, squinting at the crowd as if traveling from night into day.

  SENATOR BUTTERFIELD ARRIVED shortly after we did, late in the afternoon. Camera lights flashed and multiplied as he hiked through the snow, wearing khakis and his sleek camel-hair coat, looking years older and inches shorter than the day I’d met him. I couldn’t identify his trademark imperfection—the stain had been lifted from his coat’s collar. Minus a specific flaw, he somehow managed to emit a strong impression of disarray. He kept his eyes on the ground until he greeted his wife—a quick hand to her elbow, like they were polite acquaintances with a shared grief. Then he walked toward Skye. From where we stood, it was difficult to hear what he said. My mother told me that the TV microphones picked it up perfectly, but I never had the heart to watch the footage, which was rebroadcast throughout the state, over and over during the next few days. What Susannah and I saw was Skye’s face as her father approached: triumphant and proud of herself. Waiting to witness the miraculous change. And her father, a study in realist defeat, his shoulders hunched. Skye shook her head as he spoke, at one point raising her hands to cover her ears.

  “I won’t,” she said, her voice sharp and rising like a child’s. “I won’t until you can promise this entire crowd that those saws will never touch this tree.”

  Senator Butterfield stepped closer. He pulled her hands down from her ears, and spoke to her in a furious whisper. The only words Susannah and I could make out were, “Listen, little girl.”

  But we didn’t need to hear the words. His contorted face—all that approving light gone—told us everything we needed to know. And Skye, defiance melting as she turned a shade paler, her chin quivering with the recognition that nothing she did would make a difference. The tree would fall, along with those around it. Her father would not be converted—only exposed. She bid her chains unlocked and was loosed. I felt disappointed that she would cave so quickly. Her father took a deep breath and put his arm around her shoulders as if helping her up after an injury, holding her to him closely. The brief anger disappeared—replaced by relief, I suppose at her safety as well as her relinquishment. Her mother fell into step behind them as they walked through the woods. If Skye knew Susannah and I were there, she didn’t give any indication, just kept her eyes to the ground in synch with her father.

  Susannah and I trotted ahead to the road. We found the limo parked illegally, precariously perched astride a small snowbank. We rode into the trees and waited there, watching. By the time they arrived, Skye was crying.

  “I’m sorry,” we heard her say. “I’m so sorry.”

  Her father didn’t reply, just shielded her head as they ducked together into the backseat, the film crew close on their heels.

  The luxurious car wheels sputtered in the snow—a whir like the chainsaws, curiously silent in the distance—and then lurched onto the barely plowed road.

  “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen,” Susannah said, as they drove away. And I knew she didn’t mean Skye, her tears, or her apology, but Senator Butterfield, whose every aspect—his shoulders, his brow, his hair—looked wilted. Even his footprints looked deep and broken, gathering behind him in the snow.

  Dense air, matte light. It felt like another winter storm, brewing its way above the trees. The limo rolled out of sight, on its way to the city where Ronald Reagan presided, his old man hands trembling above the red button that would annihilate us all. From somewhere out in the world, whispers of a disease called AIDS had risen to audible volume, no one absolutely sure what it was or how it could be communicated. And who was there to protect us? Not Senator Douglas Butterfield, who had acquired what Susannah and I recognized as the unmistakable air of a great man ruined.

  We understood that nobody would save the world. It would have to find a way to survive on its own.

  13

  I TOLD MY MOTHER students were expected back at Esther Percy on Saturday, and for some reason she believed me. First thing in the morning she put me on a bus going north. I got off at the next stop and bought a ticket for Connecticut. John Paul drove his cousin’s battered Buick to Chester and picked me up; then we drove back to his house in Saw River.

  John Paul lived with his mother on one of the narrower stretches of the Connecticut River, in a modest white ranch house—aluminum siding, the lawn unseeded. His mother’s job waitressing in Essex left her with little time or energy for cleaning. She had equally little energy for policing her son and friends, making her home a likely destination whenever a place to ourselves could not be procured.

  We pulled into his narrow driveway in the late morning. The storms that left drifts of snow in western Massachusetts and Vermont had provided the barest sift of frost and white in Connecticut. The sun shone brightly on Susannah, who stood on the porch wearing Laura Ashley overalls and a white shirt with billowy sleeves. Her dark hair was piled on top of her head, and she raised a blue goblet in greeting as if she hadn’t spent nearly every day of the past three weeks with me. When I stepped onto the porch, she stood on tiptoe and threw her arms around my neck.

  “Catherine,” she said, her grip tight and urgent like a little girl’s. “We’re so glad, so very, very, very glad that you’re here. At last, at last.”

  “Ah,” John Paul said, carrying my overnight bag through the front door. “I guess you two went ahead without us.”

  NONE OF US were addictive personalities. We could go days, weeks, months without altering our states in the slightest. The drugs themselves—the chemical effects—were not what we keened toward so much as the dark and fascinating world their obtainment opened up to us. The illegality of the drugs made them feel like a vacation, leaving behind the endless rules we wove ourselves into and out of on a daily basis. Empty a gram of coke onto a mirror, blow a bong hit into a rolled-up towel, and suddenly—no question—we had broken free. Whatever happened next happened in our own land, on our own time, following the laws we had constructed for ourselves.

  Not that the drugs weren’t fun. I liked the sinking ease of alcohol and the foggy mindlessness of marijuana. The coke Susannah bought in Venezuela was pure and electric; it could change ordinary evenings—ordinary selves—into an endless awakening, our nerves open and exposed. The interminable New England winter transformed into the unceasing brightness of an Alaskan summer.

  But the only drugs I ever truly loved were the hallucinogens. That breathtaking whorl and swirl, like someone had opened the pages of a storybook and allowed me to step inside. Not only watching aurora borealis but invited to dance with the lights themselves. Everything intensified and expanded into the rolling white water of disassembled brain waves.

  “Here,” John Paul said, ripping a hit of acid in half and placing it on my tongue. He ate a whole hit plus my other half. “You’re a lightweight,” he said, to my protests.

  Then the four of us—he, Drew, Susannah, and me—went down to prowl the mud banks of the river.

  “HERE’S THE THING,” Susannah said.
r />   We had taken off our coats. The sun rose high overhead, and it seemed to be feeding us intravenously. We could scarcely stand the heat. Our bare feet squished into the muddy snowmelt. We twined our hands together, and her fingertips merged through mine, tingling velvet.

  “When you’re in South America,” she said, “you always have to check your shoes before you put them on. You can’t just crawl into bed, you have to pull back all the sheets and blankets, to make sure nothing else has crawled in there with you. And then you get home to the States, and it seems like the best relief, to just stuff your feet into your shoes without looking. To just slide into bed feetfirst. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  Susannah’s face had an unlikely construction for such a tiny girl—apple cheeks that brushed the lowest fringe of her eyelashes. Her grandmother’s neck was waddled with the most prodigious folds of flesh. It amazed me now, staring at Susannah, that the expanse of skin beneath her eyes would one day gather beneath her chin. I reached out a finger and touched the taut, fine smoothness at her clavicle.

  “I see what you’re saying,” I said. “You’re talking about Skye.”

  “Yes!” Her voice echoed over the water, amazed and elated at my understanding.

  From somewhere above, along a tangled path of brush and bramble, Drew called to us. “What are you two doing down there?”

  Susannah didn’t answer but lowered her voice to a whisper.

  “You think I’m jealous of her,” Susannah said. “But that’s not it. Because no one could ever come between us, between you and me. Even if you think you love someone more than me, I’ll know in my heart that you never will.”

  Straggled phragmites rose up behind her, sickly and wilted, their clean wheat hue inexplicably beautiful as they keened toward the river, Susannah’s words so intrinsically correct, there was no need for confirmation.

  “You want to protect me,” I said.

 

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