by Trevanian
While I was shuffling the pinochle cards, I mentioned that I had made a nickel doing Mrs McGivney's shopping for her.
"Mrs McGivney?" Anne-Marie asked, shuddering at the thought of getting close to a crazy lady.
"How did you happen to run into Mrs McGivney?" my mother asked, and I told her how I was playing in the back alley, and she got my attention by tapping on her window with the nickel.
"And you went up to her apartment?" Anne-Marie asked.
"Sure."
"You weren't afraid?"
"Nah."
"You didn't go in, did you?"
"Sure. She gave me a cookie."
"And you ate it?"
I asked Mother about Mrs McGivney, but she didn't know much: just that she had lived in that same house for as long as anybody could remember. "It's nice of you to run errands for her," she said. "The poor old thing." She patted my hand. "You're a good boy, Jean-Luc." I had the feeling I was being pressured into visiting Mrs McGivney again. My mother had a good-hearted desire to do things for people, and when she couldn't manage it herself, she would volunteer me. I didn't like that, but I never complained because, as she said, I was a good boy. A resentful good boy.
The possibility of a game began to take shape in my mind. "Ah-h, do you know anything about Mrs McGivney's husband?" I asked casually, dealing out the cards.
Mother said she'd never heard anyone mention a Mr McGivney. She was pretty sure Mrs McGivney was a widow, or maybe an old maid that people just called 'Mrs' out of courtesy.
Glimpsing the intriguing possibility that I just might be the only person on the whole block who knew about Mr McGivney, I shifted the subject away from them and, with the part of my mind I didn't need to play cards, I began a story game of detective in which my followers and I helped radio's Mr Keene: Tracer of Lost Persons track down the mysterious Mr McGivney, famous hero. Meanwhile Anne-Marie sat on the floor, muttering complaints on behalf of her actress paper doll about how dull, dull, dull all the clothes in the shops were, then she gasped with astonished delight when Anne-Marie's newest 'creation' was revealed.
The next day after school I climbed over our back fence into the alley to play my new game. I sat in the doorway of a shed with my back to 232 and a book up in front of my face as though I were reading it, but in reality I was keeping watch on Mrs McGivney's windows, looking over my shoulder through a small mirror I had borrowed from my mother's handbag. I could see nothing through the lace curtains. My followers complained about being bored with this no-action game, but I reminded them that the stakeout was an important part of detective work. All right, so maybe it wasn't all that much fun! But it had to be done, and we were the ones chosen by Mr Keene to do it. They could quit, if they wanted to, but me, I'd stay at my post until hell froze over, if that's what it took! I turned my face away and refused to listen to their apologies, until Uncle Jim and my faithful Japanese valet, Kato, pleaded with me to forgive them for complaining. But my admiring young niece, Gail, continued to whine about this being a dull game, so finally Tonto and I (sometimes I borrowed Tonto from The Lone Ranger) began a careful examination of the ground, using a magnifying stick to look for clues. We found what might be part of a footprint, and there was a very interesting piece of broken glass, and a half-covered cat turd that Tonto said had been dropped since the last full moon, but that was all. Searching for Lost Heroes was beginning to lose its zest as a game, and I was considering changing back to driving the Nazi Strong Troopers out of their bunkers with my blasting stick, when I heard three crisp clicks of metal on glass above me and I looked up to see Mrs McGivney smiling down from her window, holding a nickel up for me to see and motioning for me to come up. At first I felt bad: it's pretty shoddy detective work when the suspect spots the stakeout; but then I realized that maybe I could get into the apartment in the guise of a kid willing to run an errand, and do some undercover snooping around. I told my followers to wait for me there. I'd report back after I'd grilled the old dame. If they got bored, they could blast Nazis.
Mrs McGivney met me at the top of the dark stairs and I followed her into the apartment, where her husband still sat straight backed at the window, looking out over the alley, his pale eyes empty She told me that she had forgotten to write 'pickle' on her list, and she knew that Mr McGivney would just love to have one of Mr Kane's big plump dill pickles.
I couldn't be sure to get a big plump pickle, because Mr Kane's practice was to roll up his sleeve and reach down into his barrel and give you the first one he touched. If it was little, he wouldn't drop it back into the brine and try for a bigger one because, as he explained, he'd pretty soon be left with nothing but little pickles, so people would go somewhere else to buy pickles where they had a chance of getting a big one. When I returned with an average-sized pickle wrapped in white butcher paper I found the little round table by the window set up with napkins and little plates and sugar cookies and milk for two. I told Mrs McGivney that I really couldn't accept the nickel she was trying to press into my hand, not for buying something that had only cost a nickel; but she said I had walked the same distance as if I'd been sent for a whole bagful of groceries, and therefore I had earned the nickel; but I said no, I hadn't really earned it so I couldn't take it; but she continued to hold it out, standing there with her head cocked and giving me one of those ain't-I-the-cutest-thing glances out of the corners of her eyes, the kind of look Shirley Temple used when she wanted to get her way. Adults thought Shirley was just too adorable for words, with her dimples and her pouting sideward glances, shaking her pudgy finger at people she thought were being naughty, but every red-blooded American boy yearned to kick her in the butt. Hard. In the end, I took the damned nickel. Jeez!
Those sugar cookies had something against me. They didn't get caught in the corner of my mouth this time, but I had just bitten one when Mrs McGivney asked me how my mother was, and when I tried to answer through the cookie, I coughed and sprayed crumbs and ended up feeling stupid and clumsy. Not much of a start for a slick detective.
I was curious to know what was wrong with Mr McGivney, but I didn't think I should ask. Instead, I told her I'd have to be getting home before long because my mother was sick.
"Still? Oh-h, I'm sorry to hear that."
"She's almost over it."
"Is she often ill, John-Luke?"
"Only my mother calls me John-Luke. Yes, I guess you'd say she's sick pretty often. She's got weak lungs."
"And you take care of her?"
"My sister helps."
"What about your father?"
My sister and I knew our father only from a photograph taken during their two-day honeymoon in New York City in 1929: a handsome man in a linen summer suit, his jacket held open by a fist on one hip to reveal his waistcoat, a straw hat tipped rakishly over one eye, his disarmingly boyish smile both knowing and mischievous. "I don't know anything about him."
"Oh... I see. Well... the important thing is to always be a good boy and take care of your mother."
I couldn't think of anything to say and Mrs McGivney seemed content just to sit there, smiling at me vaguely, her head tipped to one side. I glanced over at Mr McGivney, but he was still staring out the window. And I remembered a scary episode of Lights Out about zombies and the living dead.
I felt Mrs McGivney's eyes on me, so I turned to her quickly and asked her the first question that came to mind, so she wouldn't guess that I had been thinking her husband might be a zombie. "Ah... ah... what was your nephew's name again?" I'd just ease into this interrogation. You know, like smart detectives do.
"My nephew?"
"The one who used to visit you, but doesn't anymore? You told me his name, but I forgot it." Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Mr McGivney. I'd never seen anyone sit so still before. Even his eyelashes didn't move. I watched to see if he'd blink.
"Do you mean Michael?"
"Michael? Who's Mi... Oh, yes. That's right. Michael." No, he didn't blink. Was it possible not to blin
k? I looked at his neck, then his wrist, but I couldn't see any throbbing of a pulse. It was almost as if...
"He's dead," she said with a sigh.
"What?" An icy wave rippled down my spine.
"Michael was killed in France. Poor, dear boy."
Oh... the nephew. I took a deep breath, and tried to get back to my interrogation. If the nephew died in France during the Great War, then he hadn't visited them for about twenty years. "Uh... Don't you have any other relations?"
She smiled a faint, sad smile. "No, no. My people are all gone, and Mr McGivney was an orphan, so no, we don't have any relations." She shrugged, and sudden tears filled her eyes but didn't fall. "No one at all."
"I'm... I'm sorry."
"Are you, John-Luke?"
"Only my mother calls me... Look, Mrs McGivney, I'd better be getting home." I rose from the chair and went to the door. "Thanks a lot for the cookie." Then I did something risky. I turned to Mr McGivney and said, "Good-bye, Mr McGivney."
"He can't hear you."
"Is he deaf?"
"No, no, he's not deaf." She opened the door for me. "Mr McGivney is a hero."
"Oh." I looked back at him. "...I see, well..." I left.
Uncle Jim, Gabby, Tonto, Jack, Doc, and the rest were in the alley, anxiously awaiting my return. "Michael!" I whispered hoarsely out of the side of my mouth. "Killed in the Great War. Write it down, and don't forget it!"
A week or so later, I was cutting through the back alley with an armful of books about birds that I was returning to the library. I no longer remember why I suddenly decided to make our ship come in by becoming a rich and world-famous ornithologist, but I wouldn't be surprised if I had just stumbled across the word 'ornithologist' and taken a fancy to it. It was a period when I lurched from one eventual profession to another, often on the basis of small clues to my destiny I found while reading the encyclopedia in the library. This idea of becoming an ornithologist lasted longer than most... a week or two, maybe. I had even begun my first book, Meet the Warbler, which I wrote as a book, with sheets of paper folded in half and stapled together so you could turn the pages and read my careful printing, which I justified right and left by spreading or cramming the final words. The cardboard cover had a crayon picture of a yellow warbler on it, and at the bottom: Written by Jean-Luc LaPointe, author. It was dedicated to 'my best friend, My Mother'. Working on the worn, fingernail-picked oilcloth of the kitchen table, carefully wiping the tip of my nib on the edge of the ink bottle after each dip to avoid blots, I painstakingly produced half a dozen pages of this seminal study, scrupulously altering a word here and there from my research sources to avoid being a copycat. Then something went wrong; I don't remember what. Maybe I misspelled a word, or miscalculated the room necessary to fit a word in, or made a blot. At all events, my effort to erase the error made a huge smear, and my attempt to erase the smear converted it into a hole, so I abandoned the profession of ornithologist and began to look for yet another career that might bring our ship into port. I found the aborted scholarly effort many years later, when I was going through my mother's things after her death. She had underlined the dedication: To my best friend, My Mother.
I had stopped in the alley to shift the heavy bird books from one arm to the other when three sharp clicks on a window above made me look up. Mrs McGivney was gesturing for me to come up. I indicated the books I was carrying and tried to mime the complicated message that I had to bring them to the library before it closed. But she just smiled, tilted her head in that little-girl way of hers, and beckoned me up, so I reluctantly returned the books to my apartment and went down the street, up her stoop, and up the staircase to the top floor.
Again the cookies and milk, again her wistful smiles, again Mr McGivney sitting perfectly still in the evening sunlight. But this time I was determined to uncover the facts about his heroism. I decided on a deceptively direct approach. "Mrs McGivney, how did Mr McGivney become a hero?"
She seemed pleased that I was interested enough to ask. "Mr McGivney was a soldier. He fought the Spanish in Cuba."
Now we were getting somewhere! A war hero! I had read something about the Spanish-American War, but I couldn't place it in history. It wasn't a war that inspired novels and movies, like the Civil War and the Great War, which we didn't think of as World War I because the trouble brewing in Europe wasn't yet called World War II. "When was that, Mrs McGivney?"
"He left to join his regiment the day after we were married. He looked so grand and handsome in his uniform!"
"Yes, but when was that?"
"I'll bet half the people on the block came to our wedding. It was up at Saint Joseph's. Do you know Saint Joseph's?"
Of course I knew Saint Joseph's. It was our parish church. Within two years, I would become an altar boy there, but at that time my only religious distinction was my ability to get through the Stations of the Cross faster than any other kid on the block. None of us would have dared to skip a single word of the five Hail Mary's we said at each stage of the Passion, nor would we have failed to bow our heads at the word 'Jesus', but we saw nothing wrong in saying the prayers as fast as we could, rising from one Station while still muttering nowandatthehourofourdeathamen, then sliding to the next on our knees and beginning its string of Aves before we'd come to a complete stop. And we would never have dreamed of failing to genuflect as we crossed the central aisle to get to the second half of the Stations, but we did it so quickly that sometimes a kid would get a bruised knee.
"Sure, I know Saint Joseph's." I made a mental note of where they got married. It didn't seem important just then, but in an investigation of this kind the smallest bit of information might turn out to be the key that unlocks...
"We stood there at the altar, him in his uniform and me in my mother's wedding dress. It was all so... beautiful. I was just seventeen, and Mr McGivney was twenty-one."
"And this was... when?"
"September. September weddings are good luck, you know."
"Yes, but what year! I mean... what year were you married, Mrs McGivney?"
"1898. That's when our boys went to Cuba."
1898. Another century! But then... let's see... if she was seventeen in 1898, and this was 1939, that would make her about sixty. That was pretty old, sure, but not impossible. Still, it seemed strange to me that this old man had been in the war before the Great War. The Great War had started when my mother was about my age, for crying out loud.
"So he was wounded while doing something brave in Cuba?" I asked.
"No, he wasn't wounded. I don't know exactly what happened. And, of course, he wasn't able to tell me after he came..." She shrugged. Then she continued in a distant voice, tenderly fingering the old memories. "I moved into this apartment right after I came back from seeing him off at Union Station. All the boys in uniform... bands playing... people waving and cheering. I made this little nest for Lawrence to come home to." She rose and started to walk around the room. "I ran up the curtains myself, and found furniture in second-hand stores, and my father helped me paint—he was a house painter, you know—and I chose this paper for the parlor—like the color?... Ashes of Roses, they called it." She took her husband's hairbrush from the sideboard and stood behind him, lightly brushing his white hair, while he sat, bathed in the westering sun that filtered through the lace curtain, looking gently out at nothing. "I wrote to Lawrence every day, telling him how our apartment was coming along. He wrote every day too, but his letters used to come in clumps—nine or ten at a time. That's how they do mail in the army. By clumps. Then... then his letters stopped coming, and there was no word for a long time—more than a month." She stopped brushing and looked down upon his fine hair. "I was so worried, so frightened. I asked Mr O'Brien if he could find out why the letters weren't coming through. Mr O'Brien the mailman? Then this letter came from the government, and I was afraid to open it. Everybody on the block knew I had this government letter because Mr O'Brien told them. My mother and father and sister came and
asked what the news was. I told them I hadn't dared to open the letter. My father said I was acting silly; there was no point in putting it off. I might as well know one way or the other. But I didn't want to, so my father said he'd open it for me, but I said no! No, Lawrence was my husband, and it was my duty to open the letter.... when I was ready."
Tears stood in her pale blue eyes, and her voice had gone tense and thin as she relived standing up to her old-country father, probably for the first time ever, telling him that Lawrence was her husband and she would open the letter when she was ready.
Then she blinked and looked across at me. "You know what? I believe that was the first time I said the word 'husband' aloud. I always called him Lawrence, of course. And we'd only been married four months, and I'd been busy fixing up our home, so I didn't see many people or get much chance to talk about him. My husband... husband." As she savored the word, she began brushing his hair again.
As I sat watching her brush his hair while he gazed, empty-eyed, at the roofscape beyond his window, his pale cheeks suddenly trembled! Then his lips drew back in an unconscious rictus that revealed long, yellow teeth, but the eyes remained dead.
A sharp breath caught in my throat. "Mrs McGivney... he just... he...!"
She nodded. "I know. He sometimes smiles when I brush his hair. Lawrence just loves having his hair brushed."
Well, it didn't look like a smile to me. It looked like a man in terrible pain hissing out a silent scream through his teeth. Then, with a slight quiver, his cheeks relaxed, the grin collapsed, and the teeth disappeared.
It was a moment before my heart stopped thudding in my chest. I wanted to get out of there, but a private investigator working for Mr Keene, Tracer of Lost Persons doesn't turn tail. I drew a deep breath and asked, "What about the letter? It said he was a hero?"
"Yes, a hero."
"What had he done?"
"It was from his commanding officer. Captain Frances Murphy? He regretted having to tell me that Private Lawrence McGivney had contracted an illness in the performance of duty. He was in a military hospital and would soon be shipped home so he could get every care and comfort—I remember the exact words. Every care and comfort. That's what I've tried to give him. Captain Murphy went on to say that Private McGivney was a cheerful and willing soldier and that he was well liked by everybody in the regiment. Think of that! Everybody in the whole regiment."