“Can’t we keep this friendly, Mother?”
“I don’t trust you, dear. You were your daddy’s girl, not mine.” Mrs. Williams’s face, distorted by the travesty of a smile, looked fired upon, the marksman drilling black holes on each side of her thin nose.
Sounds in the room collected, the ticking of an antique clock, the gurgling of an aquarium of tropical fish. Whispers came from the chintz chairs. The man lashed out with his cane, as if to score the air, and then, the strength leaving his arm, he dropped it. He stared at Mary as if he wanted to reveal himself, to divulge his preoccupations, to lay out the thoughts that came to him in the night. “He married into the Rockefellers,” Mrs. Williams confided. “He used to command boardrooms, now he has to have his face wiped after he eats.”
Mary pictured his lost world of dark business suits with faint stripes, of corporate carpeting muffling the hardest footfalls, of sleek-limbed women bending over Canon copiers, of disembodied voices speaking to him in elegant English from Brussels and Berlin.
“He’s Exeter and Yale,” Mrs. Williams said. “He’s Skull and Bones.”
His hair reduced to a trace of cigar smoke, his uncertain legs elementary, he struggled to his feet, fumbled open his pants, and projected himself. Unabashed, the two women in the chintz chairs smiled at each other.
“He thinks we don’t know he’s had an implant,” Mrs. Williams said coolly. Then in a louder voice: “That’s wonderful, Mr. Skully. But we’ve seen enough.”
“I think I’d better go,” Mary said.
Mrs. Williams rose with ceremony, smoothed her dress — she always wore linen in the summer — and touched her hair. Leaving the common room, mother and daughter progressed through the oak-paneled passage, encountered the scent of musk, and ran into Mrs. Nichols, who appeared so abruptly she might have stepped out of the woodwork.
“Mr. Skully was exhibiting again,” Mrs. Williams said.
Mrs. Nichols frowned. “I’ll restrict him.”
“No need, my dear. We’re all quite used to him.”
Mary blurted out, “How is Mrs. Gunner?”
“Quite well,” Mrs. Nichols said. “She’s having a little nap.”
Seated on the cot’s edge, Dudley tore a sneaker off, then the other. When he stripped away Chief Morgan’s old argyles, his feet looked like fish plundered from the cleanest waters, though an odor arose. His shirt was open to an anemic chest, which he scratched. “I feel dirty,” he said.
“Perhaps you are,” Morgan said.
“I need a shower. A real one. Not with a hose.”
Morgan stood over him with a notepad and pencil. “Everything you’ve told me, I want you to put it in writing.”
He looked up with a smile. “I can’t, Chief. It was all in confidence. Between you and me. Our secret.”
“That’s not the way it works,” Morgan said harshly, his tolerance exhausted, his irritation building. “The free ride is over.”
From Dudley came silence; between them lay an emptiness. Morgan stepped back and viewed him from an oblique angle, a different perspective that yielded nothing except a glint of irony, like light that shoots off ice.
“My problem, Dudley, is I’m beginning to believe you.”
“Yes, I thought you might.” He seemed pleased, in a modest way triumphant. “I didn’t need to push the boy. He was open to suggestion.”
“That’s hard to accept.”
“You weren’t there.” Dudley’s smile gave a lift to his words. “He went on his own.”
Morgan stood fixed. “How about the little girl?”
“That was slightly different, but just as easy.”
“Any others?”
“One, but that was long ago.”
“People hired you?”
“That’s confidential.”
“Too late for that.” Morgan tossed the pad and pencil on the cot. “I want it all written out, your hand. You don’t have a choice.” Morgan strode to the cell door, yanked it open, and stepped outside. “I’ll be back in an hour. If it’s not all down on paper, I’m turning you over to the state police.”
“That doesn’t frighten me.”
Morgan spoke through the bars. “They won’t treat you the way I have.”
Dudley’s smile, a gash, began to heal when he picked up the pad. “I’ve never used weapons. I wouldn’t know how.”
“I believe you,” Morgan said.
• • •
Ira Smith came home early, his face in its usual pleasant mold despite problems. A senior partner in his law firm’s Washington office had committed improprieties with several trust accounts, and he needed to fly down there, to do what he could. In the bedroom he slipped an extra suit into a garment bag. “This might take a couple of days,” he said calmly.
Regina Smith placed a hand on the back of his shaved neck. Dear Ira. He was a paragon of reasonableness, no wild cards in his deck, no jokers. In a shuffle he always came out the same. “Must you leave now? Wouldn’t tomorrow do?”
“I’m afraid not.” He closed a small suitcase bearing necessities and moved to a dresser to use a pair of hairbrushes on his head. “A limo will be here in an hour.”
“Then we have time for a sherry.”
Downstairs, in a room recently redone at great expense, they took chairs near casement windows set in lustrous walls. The afternoon light streaked to crystalware that fired back hard little rays. Brass objects became gold. Regina took a sip of sherry and sat back.
“What do you hope to accomplish down there?”
“Damage control. That’s the Washington buzzword.” He adjusted his horn-rims and gazed beyond her. “Anthony and Patricia, they’re not around?”
“They’re at one of the beaches, Rye, I believe. That’s a matter we must settle when you come back.” She did not need to explain. She had voiced her concerns several times. Changing the subject, she said, “Harley Bodine seems to be coming out of it.”
“It’s been good of you to look after him.”
“I haven’t exactly done that, and I wouldn’t want him becoming dependent on me.”
“Is that a possibility?”
“I may have to wean him,” she said lightly. She felt free to tell Ira nearly anything. She trusted him. He was void of jealousy, incapable of malice, and slow to judge, in comfortable ways a perfect husband who would always be there for her. His first wife had raced through one red light too many and had died of head trauma.
Their sherries drunk, she heard him say, “I never wanted to open a Washington office.”
“Why did you?”
“I didn’t listen to myself.”
She waited with him outside, his garment bag draped over his suitcase. In a maverick breeze silver birches sprinkled the air with little leaves. Some of the lilies were molting, which brought to her a momentary sadness. As a child she had wanted it always to be summer — blue skies and meadow flowers. As an adolescent she had occasionally let silly stuff consume her. She had wanted to die on a dance floor, in someone’s arms.
Ira said, “I’ll call you.”
“Yes, please do.”
Through the shrubbery flanking the long drive came flashes of creamy white and the intermittent glare of a windshield. Ira retrieved his garment bag. A robin offered up a song as the endless automobile, floating on scented air, curved toward them. Ira reached for his suitcase.
“Nothing more ugly than a stretch limo,” she said. “Detroit with a hard-on.”
He looked at her with surprise. “I’ve never heard you talk like that before.”
“Sometimes I do.”
• • •
Beverly Gunner pulled a small color photo from her bag and held it up for the ball player’s wife to see. “This was my daughter,” she said, and Sissy Alexander, childless, viewed it with shy politeness. Then she swiftly returned the picture to her bag. No one could know the depth of her grief, the loneliness of her situation. Phoebe Yarbrough looked at her with extreme kindness.
“You mustn’t brood, Bev.”
Sitting hot and immobile, her punch glass empty, Anne Lapierre said, “Why aren’t we in the pool?”
Germaine English and Kate Bodine rose in unison, followed by Phoebe and then Sissy Alexander, all with bathing suits under their clothes. Kate Bodine came out of her shirt and shorts in splendidly large proportions and shook her blond hair free. Her suit was the sort Olympic swimmers wear, and Germaine English’s was the white of lingerie worn under wedding dresses. Sissy Alexander was a butterball in ruffled yellow. Phoebe stripped down to an off-white bikini, the top and bottom no more than breaths in winter air.
Phoebe said, “Come on, Bev.”
“I can’t.” Everyone was on her feet except she. “I don’t have a bathing suit.”
“Go in your underwear.”
Anne Lapierre, tugging at the sturdy bra of her suit, said from the diving board, “Go naked.”
“I’m not beautiful,” she said, her feet glued into her pumps.
“No woman is not beautiful,” said Phoebe.
Her body was vernacular, Phoebe’s was the King’s English. And the dancer’s harmony of flesh and bone. “I’m afraid of water.”
“Then get it over with,” said Anne Lapierre.
The pool’s surface looked like colored glass too precious to break. Anne Lapierre shattered it with an awkward dive. Kate Bodine’s was more coordinated. Sissy Alexander squeezed her nose and jumped in, making the biggest splash. Germaine English tested the water with her foot and slid in. Phoebe held back.
“You don’t have to, Bev. It’s up to you.”
She heaved herself from the chair, her dress sticking to her bottom, her pumps pinching her toes, which made her unsteady. She could enter the shallow end of the pool, wade up to her waist, and ease her bladder. But no, it would show. And she’d suffer the shame of a pup caught piddling on the carpet.
“Maybe you shouldn’t,” Phoebe said. “Are you tipsy?”
At the deep end of the pool, removing nothing, not even her watch, she felt the skin tighten across her face to the point she feared something would pop. Her inner ear picked up the rhythm of her husband’s soundless anger, and her mental eye witnessed a hitherto unimaginable degree of hate. The isthmus of sex was their only meaningful connection, but his lovemaking was primitive. She loathed the doggy position.
Someone from the pool yelled to Phoebe. “Watch her!”
Phoebe grasped her arm. “Come back, Bev.”
Tearing free and tumbling forward, she committed the first rash act of her life and made the biggest splash.
• • •
Chief Morgan lunched late at the Blue Bonnet and returned to the station with a sense of mission, immediately aborted when he encountered the faces of Meg O’Brien and Sergeant Avery. “Don’t tell me,” he said in a low voice and proceeded down the corridor to the cell. The door hung open, the chain dangling from the bars. He went to the cot and snatched up the pad of paper. Drawn with care was the cartoon face of a boy, which easily could have been a girl.
Sergeant Avery and Meg O’Brien had come up behind him. Meg said, “I was on the phone, James. My back was turned.”
“It was my fault,” Sergeant Avery confessed. “I let him out to go to the toilet, and then I had to use it. I was in there for a while.”
“He had one of those Penthouses with him,” Meg said. ”Didn’t you, Eugene?”
“You mean you didn’t lock him up?” Morgan said and sailed the pad of paper back onto the cot. “No one’s to know. We have to find him.”
Meg said, “Do we really want him back, James?”
“Yes, Meg, we really do.”
Climbing into the rear of the taxi, Mary Williams woke the waiting driver, who pulled himself erect behind the wheel and turned the ignition. The motor stuttered, then found a voice. “Not to worry, ma’am.”
“I’m not, John. I feel perfectly safe.” On the way to Interstate 93, she studied the solid back of his neck, the heavy curves of his ears, and the rough graying head of hair. “When are you going to let me sketch you?” she asked. “It really would be worth your while.”
Their eyes met in the rearview. “I’m not for sale, ma’am.”
“Then do it for free.”
“I was going to do it at all, it’d be for the money.”
On the interstate, she felt the shock of passing cars. John drove with both hands on the wheel, his eyes straight ahead. She said, “May I ask you something?”
“I’m used to questions.”
“Is it difficult being black?”
“Being blind would be worse.”
“I’ve read everything by James Baldwin.”
“I’ve never heard of him, ma’am.”
“He found peace in Paris, but he came home to die. That’s what Dudley will do.”
“That the fella you told me about?”
“My soul mate, John.”
“Did he go to Paris too?”
“He’s nowhere.”
John screwed his head around to look at her. “Everybody’s somewhere.”
“No,” she said. “In madness, you’re neither here nor there.”
7
DARKNESS FELL FAST, WRAPPING TREES, ROLLING AWAY FLOWER beds, and stashing lawn chairs. Phoebe Yarbrough, casting a long shadow by the lit pool, collected empty punch glasses and placed them on a tray, along with crumpled napkins. Myles Yarbrough, financial worries tangling his mind, sat in the chair Beverly Gunner had occupied. “The most that can happen,” he said, “is we lose the house.”
The pool reflected her image and elongated her legs, which quivered in a breeze. On her face was a rigid smile, as if someone were taking her picture.
“I’m not saying it’ll happen,” he went on abruptly. “I’m just laying out the worst scenario.”
He spoke always in a breath of certainty, even when delivering bullshit. That they would lose the house was a given, for she had seen the ultimatum from the bank. “There are condos in Andover that are quite nice, Myles. I’ve already made arrangements to look at one.”
“Yes, just in case.” He spoke too fast, the words beaten together. Then his eyes sought reassurance, like those of a show dog that had failed to perform. He had come from money but not as much as she had thought. “Not sorry you married me, are you?” he said through the pretense of a laugh.
“It’s a question I could ask you,” she said in a tone meant to calm him. He had been a client, one of those who had sent her flowers before arriving, fellows who ran operations, took chances, walked tightropes, in her business the guys with the big balls. Now all those clients, except Myles, were a compound image in her mind. Had she not married him, he would be lumped in the glue of the others. “For better or worse, Myles, weren’t those the words?”
“I’ll bounce back, you’ll see.” He was a lawyer who directed his energies toward loopholes, went into deals with a vision of endless returns, and cooked the books of paper companies he had helped form. “You believe me, don’t you?”
She neither believed him nor loved him but had affection for him and was loyal. Picking up the tray of clinking glasses, she saw the moon emerge through the dark of distant trees. Rising, he followed her into the house, where he trod softly on a floor meant for sound.
“You ought to call Gunner,” he said, his voice as low as he could make it.
“She doesn’t want me to.”
“You don’t have a choice.” Seams showed in his face, hope in his eyes. “And while you’re talking to him, you might mention — ”
“No, Myles.”
“You didn’t let me finish.”
“I’m going to look in on her,” she said.
Beverly Gunner lay on a bed in a guest room, her head on two stacked pillows, her ruined shell of hair radiating its spill. Myles’s robe consumed her. “I feel like such a fool,” she said in the feeble light of a bed lamp. “And I’ve wrecked my watch. Paul paid a fortune for it two birthdays ago.�
�
“Maybe it can be repaired.”
“He buys me everything. Should I be grateful?”
Phoebe seated herself on the bed’s edge. Shadows in the room hung still. Beverly Gunner’s face was high red, as if dramatic necessity had brought them together.
“He never fights me with words, only cold silences. That’s why he always wins. Where’s my bag, Phoebe?”
Phoebe gave it to her and watched her bring forth the color snapshot she’d seen before. This time she got a better look at it. The eyes of the child were shallow yet inexplicable, the smile madcap yet tender. The face bespoke Beverly’s, except for the chin, which lacked precision. “She was beautiful, Bev.”
“He said my best thoughts were for her, not for the boys. He claimed she wasn’t worth it.” The picture went quickly and safely back to the bag. “She was an embarrassment to him.”
“Shouldn’t you phone him, tell him you’re here?”
“I don’t know. What time is it?”
Phoebe told her and received a puzzled look, as if the hour belonged to another day, the day to another year. Myles could be heard in another room.
“I live an interior life, Phoebe. Paul’s not a part of it.”
“Would you mind if I call him?”
“It’s not clear what I want, but you do what you wish.”
Phoebe used the phone in her own bedroom. Myles approached her from the side and stood much too close until she edged him back with an effortless movement. “At least tell him I’m the one pulled her out,” he whispered.
“She did what?” Paul Gunner’s voice rose to preemptive volume, slicing Phoebe’s explanation short, demeaning his wife’s worth. Phoebe suspected he never used his entire brain when listening to women. He said that the foolishness at the pool was beyond him. How could anyone have been so clumsy? “All I know,” he said, “is the boys and I had to eat at Burger King.”
“Paul.”
“What?”
“She’s staying here the night.” She spoke quickly so that he’d get it, and then she waited because nothing was coming from him except the sound of his labored breathing. She pictured his eyes shuttered, his pink lips pursed. Suddenly he responded.
Voices in the Dark Page 13