"We ran," Pam said. "Another woman, Grace something, I never knew her last name, was waiting for us in her Volkswagen station wagon, and we got in and drove back to the house."
"The one on Centre Street?" I asked.
She nodded. "And we decided there that we better split up. That we couldn't stay there because maybe they could identify us from the cameras. There were two in the bank that Rose spotted. I didn't know where to go so I went to the bus station in New Bedford and took the first bus going out, which was coming to Plymouth. The only time I'd ever been to Plymouth was when we took the kids to Plimoth Plantation when they were smaller. So I got off the bus and walked here. And then I didn't know what to do, so I sat in the snack bar at the reception center for a while and I counted what money I had, most of the hundred dollars you gave me, and I saw your card in my wallet and called you." She paused and stared out the window. "I almost called my husband. But that would have just been running home with my tail between my legs. And I started to call you and hung up a couple of times. I... Did I have to have a man to get me out of trouble? But then I had nowhere else to go and nothing else to try so I called." She kept looking out the window. The butter in her lobster stew was starting to form a skin as the stew cooled. "And after I called you I walked up and down the main street of the village and in and out of the houses and thought, here I am, forty-three years old and in the worst trouble of my life and I've got no one to call but a guy I've met once in my life, that I don't even know, no one else at all." She was crying now and her voice shook as she talked. She turned her head away farther toward the window to hide it. The tide had gone out some more since I'd last looked and the dark water rounded rocks beyond the beach and made a kind of cobbled pattern with the sea breaking and foaming over them. It had gotten quite dark now, though it was early afternoon, and spits of rain splattered on the window. "And you think I'm a goddamned fool," she said. She had her hand on her mouth and it muffled her speech. "And I am."
Susan put her hand on Pam Shepard's shoulder. "I think I know how you feel," Susan said. "But it's the kind of thing he can do and others can't. You did what you felt you had to do, and you need help now, and you have the right person to help you. You did the right thing to call him. He can fix this. He doesn't think you are a fool. He's grouchy about other things, about me, and about himself, a lot of things and he leaned on you too hard. But he can help you with this. He can fix it."
"Can he make that old man alive again?"
"We don't work that way," I said. "We don't look around and see where we were. And we don't look down the road and see what's coming. We don't have anything to do but deal with what we know. We look at the facts and we don't speculate. We just keep looking right at this and we don't say what if, or I wish or if only. We just take it as it comes. First you need someplace to stay besides Plimoth Plantation. I'm not using my apartment because I'm down here working on things. So you can stay there. Come on, we'll go there now." I gestured for the check. "Suze," I said, "you and Pam go get in my car, I'll pay up here."
Pam Shepard said, "I have money."
I shook my head as the waitress came. Susan and Pam got up and went out. I paid the check, left a tip neither too big nor too small—I didn't want her to remember us—and went to the car after them.
Chapter 15
It's forty-five minutes from Plymouth to Boston and the traffic was light in midafternoon. We were on Marlborough Street in front of my apartment at three-fifteen. On the ride up Pam Shepard had given me nothing else I could use. She didn't know where Rose and Jane were. She didn't know how to find them. She didn't know who had the money, she assumed Rose. They had agreed, if they got separated, to put an ad in the New Bedford Standard Times personals column. She didn't know where Rose and Jane had expected to get the guns. She didn't know if they had any gun permit or FID card.
"Can't you just go someplace and buy them?" she said.
"Not in this state," I said.
She didn't know what kind of guns they had planned to buy. She didn't really know that guns came in various kinds. She didn't know anyone's name in the group except Rose and Jane and Grace and the only last name she knew was Alexander.
"It's a case I can really sink my teeth into," I said. "Lot of hard facts, lot of data. You're sure I've got your name right?"
She nodded.
"What's the wording for your ad," I said.
"If we get separated? We just say, 'Sisters, call me at'—then we give a phone number and sign our first name."
"And you run it in the Standard Times?"
"Yes, in the personal column."
We got out of the car and Pam said, "Oh, what a pretty location. There's the Common right down there."
"Actually the Public Garden. The Common's on the other side of Charles Street," I said. We went up to my apartment, second floor front. I opened the door.
Pam Shepard said, "Oh, very nice. Why it's as neat as a pin. I always pictured bachelor apartments with socks thrown around and whiskey bottles on the floor and waste-baskets spilling onto the floor."
"I have a cleaning person, comes in once a week."
"Very nice. Who did the woodcarvings?"
"I have a woodcarver come in once a week."
Susan said, "Don't listen to him. He does them."
"Isn't that interesting, and look at all the books. Have you read all these books?"
"Most of them, my lips get awful tired though. The kitchen is in here. There should be a fair supply of food laid in."
"And booze," Susan said.
"That too," I said. "In case the food runs out you can starve to death happy."
I opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of Amstel. "Want a drink?" Both Susan and Pam said no. I opened the beer and drank some from the bottle.
"There's some bread and cheese and eggs in the refrigerator. There's quite a bit of meat in the freezer. It's labeled. And Syrian bread. There's coffee in the cupboard here." I opened the cupboard door. "Peanut butter, rice, canned tomatoes, flour, so forth. We can get you some vegetables and stuff later. You can make a list of what else you need."
I showed her the bathroom and the bedroom. "The sheets are clean." I said. "The person changes them each week, and she was here yesterday. You will need clothes and things." She nodded. "Why don't you make a list of food and clothes and toiletries and whatever that you need and Suze and I will go out and get them for you." I gave her a pad and pencil. She sat at the kitchen counter to write. While she did I talked at her. "When we leave," I said, "stay in here, Don't answer the door. I've got a key and Suze has a key and no one else has. So you won't have to open the door for us and no one else has reason to come here. Don't go out."
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"I don't know," I said. "I'll have to think about it."
"I think maybe I'll have that drink you offered," she said.
"Okay, what would you like?"
"Scotch and water?"
"Sure."
I made her the drink, lots of ice, lots of Scotch, a dash of water. She sipped it while she finished her list.
When she gave it to me she also offered me her money.
"No," I said. "You may need it. I'll keep track of all this and when it's over I'll give you a bill."
She nodded. "If you want more Scotch," I said, "you know where it is."
Susan and I went out to shop. At the Prudential Center on Boylston Street we split up. I went into the Star Market for food and she went up to the shopping mall for clothes and toiletries. I was quicker with the food than she was with her part and I had to hang around for a while on the plaza by the funny statue of Atlas or Prometheus or whoever he was supposed to be. Across the way a movie house was running an action-packed double feature: The Devil in Miss Jones and Deep Throat. They don't make them like they used to. Whatever happened to Ken Maynard and his great horse, Tarzan? I looked some more at the statue. It looked like someone had done a takeoff on Michelangelo, and been taken seriously. Did
Ken Maynard really have a great horse named Tarzan? If Ken were still working, his great horse would probably be named Bruce and be a leather freak. A young woman went by wearing a white T-shirt and no bra. On the T-shirt was stenciled TONY'S PX, GREAT FALLS, MONTANA. I was watching her walk away when Susan arrived with several ornate shopping bags.
"That a suspect?" Susan said.
"Remember I'm a licensed law officer. I was checking whether those cut-off jeans were of legal length."
"Were they?"
"I don't think so." I picked up groceries and one of Susan's shopping bags and we headed for the car. When we got home Pam Shepard was sitting by the front window looking out at Marlborough Street. She hadn't so far as I could see done anything else except perhaps freshen her drink. It was five o'clock and Susan agreed to join Pam for a drink while I made supper. I pounded some lamb steaks I'd bought for lamb cutlets. Dipped them in flour, then egg, then bread crumbs. When they were what Julia Child calls nicely coated I put them aside and peeled four potatoes. I cut them into little egg-shaped oblongs, which took a while, and started them cooking in a little oil, rolling them around to get them brown all over. I also started the cutlets in another pan. When the potatoes were evenly browned I covered them, turned down the heat and left them to cook through. When the cutlets had browned, I poured off the fat, added some Chablis and some fresh mint, covered them and let them cook. Susan came out into the kitchen once to make two new drinks. I made a Greek salad with feta cheese and ripe olives and Susan set the table while I took the lamb cutlets out of the pan and cooked down the wine. I shut off the heat, put in a lump of unsalted butter, swirled it through the wine essence and poured it over the cutlets. With the meal we had warm Syrian bread and most of a half gallon of California Burgundy. Pam Shepard told me it was excellent and what a good cook I was.
"I never liked it all that much," Pam said. "When I was a kid my mother never wanted me in the kitchen. She said I'd be messy. So when I got married I couldn't cook anything."
Susan said, "I couldn't cook, really, when I got married either."
"Harv taught me," Pam said. "I think he kind of liked to cook, but..." She shrugged. "That was the wife's job. So I did it. Funny how you cut yourself off from things you like because of... of nothing. Just convention, other people's assumptions about what you ought to be and do."
"Yet often they are our own assumptions, aren't they," Susan said. "I mean where do we get our assumptions about how things are or ought to be? How much is there really a discrete identifiable self trying to get out?" I drank some Burgundy.
"I'm not sure I follow," Pam said.
"It's the old controversy," Susan said. "Nature-nurture. Are you what you are because of genetics or because of environment? Do men make history or does history make men?"
Pam Shepard smiled briefly. "Oh yes, nature-nurture, Child Growth and Development, Ed. 103. I don't know, but I know I got shoved into a corner I didn't want to be in." She drank some of her wine, and held her glass toward the bottle. Not fully liberated. Fully liberated you pour the wine yourself. Or maybe the half-gallon bottle was too heavy. I filled her glass. She looked at the wine a minute. "So did Harvey," she said.
"Get shoved in a corner?" Susan said.
"Money?" Susan asked.
"No, not really. Not money exactly. It was more being important, being a man that mattered, being a man that knew the score, knew what was happening. A mover and shaker. I don't think he cared all that much about the money, except it proved that he was on top. Does that make sense?" She looked at me.
"Yeah, like making the football team," I said. "I understand that."
"You ought to," Susan said.
Pam Shepard said, "Are you like that?"
I shrugged. Susan said, "Yes, he's like that. In a specialized way."
Pam Shepard said, "I would have thought he wasn't but I don't know him very well."
Susan smiled. "Well, he isn't exactly, but he is if that makes any sense."
I said, "What the hell am I, a pot roast, I sit here and you discuss me?"
Susan said, "I think you described yourself quite well this morning."
"Before or after you smothered me with passionate kisses?"
"Long before," she said.
"Oh," I said.
Pam Shepard said, "Well, why aren't you in the race? Why aren't you grunting and sweating to make the team, be a star, whatever the hell it is that Harvey and his friends are trying to do?"
"It's not easy to say. It's an embarrassing question because it requires me to start talking about integrity and self-respect and stuff you recently lumped under John Wayne movies. Like honor. I try to be honorable. I know that's embarrassing to hear. It's embarrassing to say. But I believe most of the nonsense that Thoreau was preaching. And I have spent a long time working on getting myself to where I could do it. Where I could live life largely on my own terms."
"Thoreau?" Pam Shepard said. "You really did read all those books, didn't you."
"And yet," Susan said, "you constantly get yourself involved in other lives and in other people's troubles. This is not Walden Pond you've withdrawn to."
I shrugged again. It was hard to say it all. "Everybody's got to do something," I said.
"But isn't what you do dangerous?" Pam Shepard said.
"Yeah, sometimes."
"He likes that part," Susan said. "He's very into tough. He won't admit it, maybe not even to himself, but half of what he's doing all the time is testing himself against other men. Proving how good he is. It's competition, like football."
"Is that so?" Pam Shepard said to me.
"Maybe. It goes with the job."
"It's a job that lets me choose," I said.
"And yet it cuts you off from a lot of things," Susan said. "You've cut yourself off from family, from home, from marriage."
"I don't know," I said. "Maybe."
"More than maybe," Susan said. "It's autonomy. You are the most autonomous person I've ever seen and you don't let anything into that. Sometimes I think the muscle you've built is like a shield, like armor, and you keep yourself private and alone inside there. The integrity complete, unviolated, impervious, safe even from love."
"We've gone some distance away from Harv Shepard, Suze," I said. I felt as if I'd been breathing shallow for a long time and needed a deep inhale.
"Not as far as it looks," Susan said. "One reason you're not into the corner that Pam's husband is in is because he took the chance. He married. He had kids. He took the risk of love and relationship and the risk of compromise that goes with it."
"But I don't think Harvey was working for us, Susan," Pam Shepard said.
"It's probably not that easy," I said. "It's probably not something you can cut up like that. Working for us, working for him."
"Well," Pam Shepard said. "There's certainly a difference."
"Sometimes I think there's never a difference and things never divide into column A and column B," I said. "Perhaps he had to be a certain kind of man for you, because he felt that was what you deserved. Perhaps to him it meant manhood, and perhaps he wanted to be a man for you."
Pam said, "Machismo again."
"Yeah, but machismo isn't another word for rape and murder. Machismo is really about honorable behavior."
"Then why does it lead so often to violence?"
"I don't know that it does, but if it does it might be because that's one of the places that you can be honorable."
"That's nonsense," Pam Shepard said.
"You can't be honorable when it's easy," I said. "Only when it's hard."
"When the going gets tough, the tough get going?" The scorn in Pam Shepard's voice had more body than the wine. "You sound like Nixon."
I did my David Frye impression. "I am not a crook," I said and looked shifty.
"Oh, hell, I don't know," she said. "I don't even know what we're talking about anymore. I just know it hasn't worked. None of it, not Harv, not the kids, not me, not the house and
the business and the club and growing older, nothing."
"Yeah," I said, "but we're working on it, my love."
She nodded her head and began to cry.
Chapter 16
I couldn't think of much to do about Pam Shepard crying so I cleared the table and hoped that Susan would come up with something. She didn't. And when we left, Pam Shepard was still snuffling and teary. It was nearly eleven and we were overfed and sleepy. Susan invited me up to Smithfield to spend the night and I accepted, quite graciously, I thought, considering the aggravation she'd been giving me.
"You haven't been slipping off to encounter groups under an assumed name, have you?" I said.
Robert B Parker - Spenser 04 - Promised Land Page 10