Greenwich

by Howard Fast

“That’s enough,” Abel said firmly. “They’re sitting down. The first course and then the wine. So get your little asses in there.”

  Sally had spent at least an hour over the seating. She had place cards of china, small pieces that you could write a name on in ink and then simply rub it off, and the lady in the shop on Greenwich Avenue where she purchased them had assured her that they were in the best of taste. She sat at one end of the table, her husband at the other, and put Sister Pat on her right. Richard would be happy to have Muffy on his right. She knew that Castle liked to play a touching game under the table, especially with Muffy Platt, and she felt that as an understanding and grateful wife, she should overlook this. Actually, it did not bother her too much. Muffy was older and not aging well after a face-lift; and for all of his wandering, she felt that Richard would never leave her. Men were a continuing mystery to her, and thus she accepted them however they were.

  Actually, the dinner party was becoming a great success, and Sally glowed. Let Richard play his game with Muffy. The old witch got little enough from her own husband, and the result would be a more amorous Richard Castle that night when they went to bed. The food was not entirely to Sally’s taste—she would take off at times to stuff herself at McDonald’s—but she had gotten used to odd sauces and exotic flavors; and as for the guests, they were in food’s seventh heaven.

  Sally herself was straining her ears, as was Sister Pat Brody, to follow a discussion between Monsignor Donovan and Harold Sellig, with an occasional intervention from Mary Greene and her husband, Herbert.

  “As I understand your point of view,” the monsignor was saying, “you’re making a case for social guilt. In other words, it’s not only the nuns and lay workers and Jesuits and Archbishop Romero who were murdered in El Salvador, presumably by assassination squads that we trained, but you include President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King—” He paused.

  “And others,” Sellig said. “Luminaries, of course. They provide the substance for the media. But those who die in war, of starvation, of the casual killing—”

  “But that’s too broad a brush,” Herb Greene protested. “Assassination is a word of precise meaning.”

  “Yes, for you, Professor. You’re a linguist. But in social practice, or in a literary sense, if you will, words expand and take on a broader meaning. Take two of the adjectives commonly used by the kids today; awesome and cool. Each has lost its technical meaning. Take awesome. My son’s eighteen, going into his first year at Columbia next fall. I tell him that I’ve been writing the past four hours, he responds that it’s positively awesome.”

  Sally noticed that Castle had stopped whispering to Muffy Platt and was now listening.

  The monsignor was savoring his food and looking with interest at Harold Sellig, whom he had not met before.

  “Would you agree, Monsignor?” Mary Greene asked. “I read Daniel Berrigan. I mean, I’m not asking whether you agree with Father Berrigan, but I think that is his point of view.”

  The monsignor glanced at Sellig, raising an inquiring brow.

  “I never read Berrigan,” Sellig said. “That’s a cross I bear, an odd thing for a Jew to say, the books I should have read but never had the time to and never will, I suppose.”

  Smiling, the monsignor nodded. “Not so odd, Mr. Sellig. You’d be surprised to hear how many Jews I know who carry crosses—invisible ones, of course, but still very heavy.”

  Castle entered the conversation for the first time. “Where,” he asked, “did you get your ideas about assassination, Harold?”

  “Well, Richard, not out of books. I had a long lesson in Vietnam.”

  “Oh, please! We’re not going to talk about Vietnam,” Muffy said. “I am so tired of Vietnam.”

  “Yes, words change their meaning,” Herb Greene said. “That’s one of the things that make linguistics so fascinating. Assassination is an unusual word, derives from hashish. They say a group of fanatics addicted to hash murdered designated religious and political opponents by strangulation. But it is a fairly precise word. I know the Mafia has a whole vocabulary for the same process, but assassination is still political. Forgive me, I have a genetic inclination to lecture.”

  “It’s fascinating,” Sally said, and wondered why her husband frowned at her. She almost never spoke or offered any opinion when Castle’s friends were there, but this comment seemed unremarkable.

  The next course came and the wineglasses were topped off. Sally hadn’t touched hers. She knew that a single glass of wine loosened her tongue, and she felt safer when she did not talk.

  “I’m not dodging your question about Dan Berrigan,” Donovan said to Mary Greene. “But you’re absolutely right. He does expand the responsibility for murder and in that responsibility, he includes war. But I must add that his views on the subject are not the views of the majority of the church.”

  Herb Greene said, “I’m tempted to ask whether they are your views?”

  The monsignor smiled. “I’m glad you’re only tempted.”

  “Because of being married to a Catholic for some thirty years,” Greene explained, “I’m frequently tempted to ask questions that shouldn’t be asked.”

  Sellig, Jewish and married to a Presbyterian whose faith was as negative as his, said nothing, listening warily. By now the discussion had involved the entire table, and Sister Pat Brody said sharply, “I do read Dan Berrigan and his brother, Philip, and you’re absolutely right, Mary. That’s his point of view, and someday, God willing, it will be the whole church’s point of view. And if you were to ask me, Mr. Castle”—softening her voice—“how I came to this decision, I would answer that it came out of prayer and years in places like El Salvador.” She finished her glass of wine.

  Sellig was relieved that his wife was not present, knowing that if she had been, she would have found some excuse to take him aside and say to him, “Harold, will you please not continue to inflict that damn book of yours on anyone and everyone who will listen.” And while he was brooding over this, the monsignor confessed, “I have your manuscript on my desk. I’m trying to find time to read it.”

  “Do you have an extra copy of the manuscript, Harold?” Mary Greene asked, not mentioning that he had already sent her husband one, which she had given to the monsignor.

  “I’m afraid I do,” Sellig replied, looking somewhat confused. “In my car as a matter of fact.”

  Sally had never spent an evening like this. Usually, either at her dinner table or in her living room, the men talked about golf and stocks and investments and futures and other things that she was equally indifferent to, and the women spoke about the endless problems with their children and their homes and their husbands—sotto voce, although the men paid no attention to what they were talking about—and when the men engaged the women in conversation, it was limited to golf and vacation places or whispered if the man or woman was coming on—but this! This had never happened before, and she didn’t really know whether she enjoyed it or found it troubling; yet while she could not understand why her husband had allowed her to invite the two clerics, she decided that she absolutely loved Sister Pat Brody, and though she was unable to make much of the conversation or what Sister Brody meant about her years in strange places, she nevertheless decided that she would go to the library one day soon and find out what or where El Salvador was and what Sister Brody had done there.

  Sally was not the only person at the table mystified by Richard’s willingness to include Sister Brody and Monsignor Donovan at dinner. Knowing Castle from previous occasions and plentiful gossip, both Professor Greene and his wife were surprised, though delighted, to meet such unexpected guests. Sellig was intrigued, and as for Muffy, she was, as she put it later, pissed off at their egghead chatter; but the truth was that she was interested in the monsignor, a lean, handsome, hawk-faced man who reminded her of Clint Eastwood. Her thoughts during most of the dinner, as she nibbled at the baby vegetables and the risotto, sticking to her vow of never eat
ing more than half of any dish, were of being alone with Donovan for a few hours. A celibate man was outside of her experience, and she mused over how she might go about it.

  Finally, Sally announced that there would be coffee and cognac in the living room, and that the men who wished to smoke might remain at the table. Castle had told her that this was the way “old money” did it, and while she had never encountered old money at a dinner table, she had seen the practice on film and was delighted that she could do more or less the same. Both Sellig and Professor Greene went through a shared guilt, since they were both feminists, but neither could resist the lure of valid Cohibas. Sellig salved his guilt by phoning his wife, who said to him, “I just don’t know, Hal—no, I can’t leave. He’s still in intensive care.”

  “I’ll join you in about an hour or less,” Sellig said, assuring her that intensive care was by no means unusual in a case like this.

  As Castle passed the cigars and poured brandy, he wondered what the monsignor’s response would be.

  “Since His Holiness has been to Cuba, I feel it mitigates a modest misdemeanor,” Donovan said. “I haven’t smoked a Cuban cigar in a long time. Thank you, Richard.”

  Eleven

  Christina Manelli, the younger of Frank and Contance Manelli’s two daughters, would be a sophomore at Greenwich High School after the summer break. Meanwhile, she had a job in Belle Haven as a day sitter for a family with two small children, a girl of five and a boy of seven. She worked from 10:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. and at times an hour or two more. She didn’t mind that, and she liked the kids, and she was more than satisfied with the hundred dollars a week that they paid her. Half of if she gave to her mother, who put it into Christina’s college account. Five dollars a week went to the plate at mass, which left her with forty-five dollars to spend as she wished, enough for movies and anything else she desired.

  She loved to read, and one of the pleasant things about Greenwich was a book exchange that had been set up at the town dump. People brought books for which they had no use and left them at the little book shack at the dump, where volunteers put them on shelves, and they were free to anyone who wanted them.

  Both Belle Haven, a corner of Greenwich shore where houses were even more expensive than in the Back Country, and the dump were within walking distance of Chickahominy, perhaps the most modest neighborhood in Greenwich; and since Christina lived in Chickahominy, she felt that her summer job was perfect.

  Christina was a beautiful young woman who, living in a world of blond girls, some natural, some out of a bottle, was totally unconscious of her own beauty. She was five feet three inches, smaller than most Greenwich girls of her age, slender, with budding breasts, ivory skin, and jet black hair, cut short because she was not proud of jet black hair.

  She had met Dickie Castle, Richard’s son, some weeks ago at the book shack. Sally Castle, Dickie’s stepmother, belonged to the Book-of-the-Month Club, the Literary Guild, and the Detective Book Club, but since Sally read only an occasional detective story, the unread books tended to pile up. Neither Dickie nor his father read books, and there were no bookshelves in the house that were not loaded with bric-a-brac—which accounted for Dickie appearing at the book shack one morning with a bag of books.

  Dickie was seventeen, and he would be going into the twelfth grade at Greenwich Village School, the most pretentious, if not the most esteemed, private school in Greenwich. At seventeen, his sexual experience approached that of his father’s, but that was not unusual in the circle where he moved, and perhaps because Christina was so unlike most of the girls he knew, he was taken with her. Having struck up a conversation and discovering that she appeared at the book shack between nine and ten in the morning, he managed to be there and meet her three times, each time returning books he had chosen almost at random and which he never opened.

  He kept asking her for a date. Christina, ashamed to tell him that she did not date, finally gave in, got her mother’s permission, and agreed to dinner and a movie. In her mind, dinner meant pizza and the movie, a local show on Railroad Avenue, where the film complex offered three choices.

  Christina put on a pretty yellow cotton dress and a thin white sweater. She had no high-heel shoes, and finally she decided on her white flats instead of the sneakers she usually wore. Dickie picked her up just before six o’clock in his two-seater BMW. She had seen the BMW before, when Dickie came to the dump, but BMWs were so common in Greenwich that she didn’t think it unusual that he should have one at his disposal, and she liked the style of the car with its convertible top down and black leather upholstery. She had heard her mother and father talk about the disproportion between income and car in Greenwich, so she simply accepted it, asking only, “Is it your dad’s car?”

  “It’s mine. Dad gave it to me for my seventeenth birthday. That was almost a year ago,” he added. He was a good-looking boy, blond hair and blue eyes, and if he didn’t mind that she was poor, the BMW was no proof that he was rich. Of course, he went to the Village School, and that took money. But he didn’t appear disturbed when he picked her up in front of the small house in Chickahominy. He didn’t talk very much, except to say that he had heard that Godzilla wasn’t a great film and that he didn’t like lizards much. She asked him whether everyone called him Dickie, and he replied, “Yeah, guess so.” But none of the boys she knew in high school talked very much. She said she liked Dick better, and he said, “Sure,” and burst out laughing. She blushed when she realized what he was thinking.

  In the movie house, he let his hand drop onto her thigh. She pushed it off. When he did it again, she said, “Please, Dickie, I’m trying to watch the film.”

  “It’s a lousy film!” he said loudly, and heads turned in their direction. When the movie was over, he observed, “They just try to scare you. Were you scared?”

  “A little.”

  “It’s easy to scare girls.”

  “Yes, I guess so.” She wished they could go home and end the evening, but she didn’t know how to suggest that. “We can walk to the pizza place. It’s just around the corner.”

  “I ain’t taking you to some pizza place,” he said indignantly. “We’re going to a real restaurant.”

  “Where?”

  “Look, this is a date, and you’re beautiful. You deserve the best. We’re going to La Crémaillère. That’s the best restaurant around here—trust me. I already made the reservation.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Banksville.”

  She shook her head. “It’s too far, Dickie. It’s the other end of town.”

  “Twenty minutes. I open this beauty up, I can make it in fifteen.”

  “No, I don’t want you to speed, please—” searching her mind for some way to get out of this; and at the same time, the thought intruding and telling her that none of the girls she knew had ever been to a place like La Cremaillere and what a coup that would be, and anyway, he hadn’t made any moves toward her since the two attempts in the movie house. And then common sense kicked in, and she pleaded, “I have to be home by ten. I told my mom that.”

  “Ten! Jesus, this is a dinner date. Besides, it’s only eight!”

  They were already on North Street, the major north-south road in Greenwich.

  “I’m not dressed for a place like that.”

  “You’re dressed fine.”

  “No, please. I don’t want to go there.”

  Dickie braked the car and slid off the road to the right, alongside a high stone wall, one of the succession of stone walls that lined North Street, high stone walls twelve and fourteen inches thick, as if each of the expensive homes that nestled behind them was an ancient city ready to repel the barbarians.

  “Look, you dumb brat!” Dickie exploded. “I’m taking you to a place where the check will be more than a hundred bucks. You’ll be the first kid from Chickahominy who ever set foot in that dining room, and you’re doing nothing but whining about it. What am I, chopped liver?”

  Christina had nev
er heard the expression before, and in spite of her anxiety, she began to giggle. Dickie pulled her toward him, kissed her, and fondled her breast. “Come on, come on,” he begged her, sliding his hand down to her crotch. “We’re going to have a great time.”

  She tried to pull away, shouting, “Damn you, stop! You stupid little bastard!”

  “Bitch!” He slapped her with all his strength, a solid blow to her face. Her senses reeling, she managed to get the door open. Dickie grabbed her left arm and twisted. She screamed with pain, pulled loose, and stumbled out of the car into the stone wall, scratching her face.

  “Get back in the car!” he yelled.

  Christina curled up against the wall, her arms clutched around her, weeping with pain and frustration.

  A long moment passed, and then he said, no longer shouting, “Come on, Christina. Get in the car. I’ll take you home.”

  “Go to hell!” she burst out.

  Another long moment. “All right, fuck you!” He pulled the door closed and took off like a drag racer. Christina touched her face, winced, her fingers wet with blood. When she moved her left arm, the pain was agonizing. Curled up like that, she was like another big rock or a pile of something, anything, in the lights of the occasional car that passed. It was just past twilight, and darkening quickly. Bad luck breaks sooner or later, and this time it was Abel Hunt and his son, driving home from the Castles’.

  Abel’s eyes were on the road, and to his peripheral vision, the splash of the yellow dress might have been an early cluster of daylilies, briefly illuminated in the darkness, but his son cried out, “Pop, stop! Stop!” The car screeched to a halt. “Back up.” It was dark now, and the road was empty. “Pop, pull over on the shoulder.”

  They both got out of the car and walked to Christina, still curled up in a protective ball.

  “My God,” Joe said, “it’s Christina.”

  Abel bent over her, “Christie—Christie.”

  She looked up at the big black man, looming over her and shrank back.