Of course he could come in. He could read Paul his rights and then take him away, and the boys too, in handcuffs if necessary. She reeled. The possibility of a new life touched her down to her toes.
She heard the door close. What were they saying? Submerging her thoughts, she tried to attend only to the voices, particularly the chief’s, but Paul’s, fat and intrusive, kept getting in the way.
“What did you say your name was, Chief? Moran?”
“Morgan.”
She slipped across the room to hear them better, but they were moving away. The chief was being led to the study, where her husband could flump himself into a club chair, brim over it, and act like the lord of a manor, though she imagined the chief would soon have him back on his feet. After a few moments she crept after them.
The door to the study was ajar. Peering through the crack, she saw the roundness of her husband’s head and glimpsed a quarter of the chief’s face, which she found reassuring, though she wished he would speak louder. She listened hard.
Her husband said, “What’s your interest? It didn’t happen here.”
Of course it did. Where else would he have dared to do it? The formal rigor of his voice had nothing to do with the truth. She stood straight, with her hands pressed to her thighs.
The chief said, “Are you satisfied it was an accident?”
It was no accident! He had split Phoebe’s face, cracked a bone, and her face, tended to at the hospital in Lawrence, was swollen and bandaged. Good God, Chief, don’t be taken in!
“She was clumsy, mentally and physically,” her husband said. “Look here, this is not something I enjoy discussing.”
“I understand.”
“No, you don’t. But I understand where you’re coming from. I know about your business with Bodine, which I consider cruel and suspect on your part.”
What was this about? Something was going over her head and curving away from her. Paul, with no allegiance to the facts, was muddling things the way he did when she tried to speak her mind. In the end it was she left muddled.
“What disturbs me the most about you, Chief, is your business with Bodine’s wife.”
This was getting out of hand. What did Kate Bodine have to do with it? She could see most of the chief’s face now, and it was no longer reassuring but blank and harmless. Disappointment came up on her like phlegm in her throat.
“My suspicion,” Paul said, “is you’re performing for her.”
“May I speak with your wife?”
“Absolutely not. You’re not going to upset her the way you have Bodine.”
She felt she was being drawn to the center of something unsavory, and she remembered a blood uncle whose kisses had left slaver on her young mouth. She ran a hard hand across her lips as if it were there now and found herself remembering silly things, like the grit on her teeth after eating spinach and the stain in her urine after enjoying asparagus.
“Three years my wife’s still not herself.”
Three years? Then she understood, and her face went hard and tight as if to stem bleeding. It wasn’t Phoebe the chief had come about. It was her baby. It was Fay.
• • •
Dudley appeared in the garden as if blown in, and the Reverend Mr. Stottle, who relished intangibles, put aside the pad of paper on which he had composed Sunday’s sermon and gestured from his canvas chair. “Watch your step.”
A fiercely green creeper threw tentacles at Dudley’s sneakered feet. The thorns of rosebushes endangered the path. “I’m a bird on the wing,” he said.
“Then you’ve flown the coop,” the reverend said, in a marvelous mood from the balance in his life, the worldly ingrained in the ether. Earlier he had intruded upon his wife’s privacy and found her deliciously vulgar in bra and bloomers. If Dorothea Farnham had not chosen that moment to ring up on garden club business, he would have exerted himself with a gluttony usually reserved for young lovers. Picking from a plate, he said, “Help yourself. My wife made them.”
Pink cupcakes occupied a ring of glazed cookies. A milk scum sheathed the tumbler the reverend had been drinking from. Dudley said, “I’m not a bad fellow.”
“We’re not angels, none of us,” the reverend said. “Nor would we want to be.”
“I have a question.”
Reverend Stottle smiled from a deeply inner delight, happy to have his thoughts scattered perhaps to another plane, to uncharted landscape. At that moment came a great honking from a wedge of Canada geese, whose summer place was Paget’s Pond. The reverend said, “They always shout when they pass over my house. What was your question again?”
“I haven’t asked it yet.”
“Please do.”
Dudley had frosting on his chin and cupcake in his mouth. “In the scheme of things,” he asked, “how much of a dent is one person’s death? Does it disturb in any way the course of the planet? Is it noted anywhere among the stars?”
The reverend, who preferred to talk around things, the way Jesus Christ had, was slow to respond. His eye was on a lush patch of big-buttoned daisies in which, wired upright, was an immense sun-dazzled spiderweb that looked like a stringed instrument on which one could pluck a deadly tune. The marvelous creator was a living jewel clasped to the air, no sight of a thread. Finally, stealing from his sermon, the reverend said, “We never experience the limits of anything. There are joys far greater and sorrows much deeper than those we know. God has reserved those for himself.”
“God lives on, we die.”
“Does that trouble you?”
“No, it pleases me.”
Reverend Stottle, pondering, placed a finger under his chin. “Have you suffered night sweats?”
“I’ve woken wet.”
“Then I must ask myself what Freudian darkness you’ve slipped out of. I’m not only a servant of God, I’m a student of psychology, and the truth is we are each alone under the skin, from cradle to grave, which makes perfect sense. God, who is utterly alone, made us in his image.”
“He may be playing jokes on us,” Dudley said, picking up a second cupcake and eating the frosting. “I mean, what else has he to do, he’s done it all.”
The sun was a blossom in Dudley’s hair, and the reverend wondered, fleetingly, whether he behaved himself in men’s rooms. A sadness seemed to pass between them. Stirring, the reverend said, “The most anyone can ask for is his sanity. When a person has that, he has a chance to make it through the later years.”
A sound came from the house, and he saw his wife coming out the side door. In no way was she heavy, but her legs were large and frankly revealed in khaki hiking shorts. He looked at her with love. In their younger years they had read poetry to each other, he with the richer voice, she with the better diction.
Dudley bit into a glazed cookie.
“Don’t make yourself sick,” the reverend cautioned.
His wife, approaching with a measured stride and a wary smile, was a thoroughly Christian woman who, however, did not share all his views or accompany him on all his flights of fancy. But always she was his strength during his deepest doubts and greatest needs.
“This is the fellow I told you about,” he said.
“Yes, I guessed that,” she said, taking in the sloppy shirt and threadbare jeans and the cookie in his hand.
“He’s from another world,” the reverend said, smiling.
“And what world is that?”
“My own,” Dudley replied.
“The police chief is looking for you,” she said.
Reverend Stottle said, “We won’t tell.”
• • •
Orville Farnham, acting in his official capacity of selectman, summoned Chief Morgan to his insurance agency, which was housed next to the fire barn. In the Saturday quiet, ensconced behind his desk, Farnham said, “I know what you’ve been doing, it’s got to stop.” He waved a nervous hand. “Sit down, for God’s sake.”
The chair possessed Morgan, locked him in. “Who called you? Gunner or Bodine?”
“Makes no difference,” Farnham said, his tone defensive only for a moment. Business at his agency had increased greatly in the years that the Heights had been developed and populated. “You can’t go around prying into people’s tragedies, especially ones that didn’t even happen here. It’s not right. It’s certainly not professional.”
Morgan’s face was immobile. In high school he had dated one of Farnham’s younger sisters, the cheeriest of three, the family favorite. A few months ago he had gazed down upon her at Drinkwater’s, where death looked innocent in a padded box. Fluids sterilized the remains, flowers scented the air, and the ghost of the deceased, unseen and unfelt, edged through the crowd, a world apart.
Farnham said, “You take too much upon yourself.”
He imagined the bouqueted funerals of the Bodine boy and the Gunner girl, each child special in a different way, each put to rest by a renegade fate. “I think I’m on to something, Orville.”
“Look me in the eye and tell me you’ve got nothing going with Bodine’s wife. See, you can’t. You’ve got no credibility in this investigation of yours.”
“Can’t a woman be just a friend?”
“Not in this town.”
He heard a chain of falling sound from the outside. Fellows from the fire barn, Zach and Chub, were playing with a ladder, yanking and loosening its ropes. He heard Zach’s curse and Chub’s laughter. For some reason he remembered when Miss Rushmore, well before Holly Pride’s time, regularly reconnoitered the stacks at the library to deter couples from fooling around. That was where he and Gloria Farnham used to kiss.
“You have to learn your place, James. It’s not in the Heights.”
He remembered when Tuck’s was still an old country store warmed by a wood stove and pervaded by the odor of men who worked in manure, pig and cow, and when veterans of very old wars, some in wheelchairs, paraded around the green in meticulously preserved regimentals. And he remembered his childhood wonderment over the way Paget’s Pond could reflect the bulk and weight of trees on its fragile surface.
“I hate talking to you like this, James. It pains me.”
Breaking the chair’s grip, Morgan struggled upright with a memory of breasts warm as muffins and feet cold as ice, his wife’s. How in hell had he gone on this long without her?
Farnham’s voice trailed him to the door. “That crazy tramp that started all this, have you let him go yet?”
“More or less,” he said and stepped out into the heat of the day.
At the station he always seemed to catch Sergeant Avery when Eugene was not quite on his feet, just getting up or sitting down, tilting one way or another, always with the air of a redundant worker trying to look busy. Meg O’Brien was eating soup from a thermos cup at her desk. Their presence, their nearness, encased him in the protection of old habits. Letting out a breath, he hoped Meg had not noticed his staring at the veins in her hands.
“He’s at the Stottles',” she said. “I’m not supposed to say who called, but it was the reverend’s wife.”
“Want me to go get him?” Sergeant Avery asked, hitching up his trousers.
Morgan went into his office. Before closing the door, he said, “Forget him.”
• • •
Regina Smith answered the telephone on the second ring and heard echoes on the line and then her daughter’s voice, breathy and impetuous. In her ear it was disruptive, and she stood in a harsh attitude of impatience, not yet ready to confront and in no mood to forgive. “What do you want, Patricia?”
“We’re still at the beach.”
“I figured.”
“Tony’s run into a friend whose parents have a summer place here. They’ve asked us to stay over. They’re the Goodmans, wonderful people. Do you know them?”
A lie, she was sure. Anthony putting her up to it, embroidering the lie for her and attaching fancy lace to make it more believable. “No, Patricia, I don’t know them.”
“Is it all right, Mom?”
Her thoughts treaded through a silence. When she spoke, her voice thickened. “Do what you want.”
She changed her clothes, shed hot colors for cool ones, forsook stockings, deodorized her underarms, and poured sherry into a small glass. She was sipping it and thumbing Vogue when the phone rang again. She thought it might be her husband, with whom she was furious for trivializing what she considered egregious. The voice was Harley Bodine’s.
“Have I called at a bad time?”
It was as if he had appeared at her elbow without warning, his face hanging close, the scent of his aftershave bearable. “No,” she said with only the faintest air of reproach. “The kids are away, Ira’s still in Washington.”
“I was wondering whether you’d like to go out for dinner again tonight.”
“No,” she said, “but come over anyway.”
• • •
Her body hot, her brain cooking, Beverly Gunner wavered with indecision and stood vulnerable, as if stripped of clothing, her bulges and pinch marks exposed. Suspicions never articulated flared at every nerve ending, and for the very first time since little Fay’s drowning she did not pray for a blank mind. Then she heard her husband’s ponderous footsteps and the heave of his breath. The air shook with his entrance into the room.
“What are you doing?” he asked, his smile crescent, meaning he wanted to make up.
She didn’t answer. Were she to place another woman inside her dress, pitch her to the light, walk her through the house, how many hours would pass before he or the boys would notice? His hand reached out.
“Don’t touch me,” she shot back, bristling, aware of a phantom strength. From outside came raucous sounds. The boys had friends over, no manners, no feelings except for themselves, all of them capering fatly at the pool’s edge, their round faces only faintly stamped by life. Her grimace was automatic.
“They’re only having fun.”
“Of course,” she said, aware of her role. She was expected to keep an eye on them, maintain order, serve sandwiches, entertain them if need be. She had the hilarious notion of joining them in the water and letting them play with her tits.
“What’s funny?”
An angry cry of pain from outside gave her ignominious satisfaction. Gustav perhaps — not Herman, who would have shrieked — had stubbed a toe or bruised a shin, probably while bullying someone, showing off, throwing his weight around. “Nothing’s funny, Paul. When has anything been funny?”
He scowled. “One of us should see to them.”
“Yes, one of us should.” Tilting sideways, she opened a dresser drawer and fished through underwear.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for a cigarette.”
The frog in her throat and the gravel in her voice drove him away, which didn’t surprise her. She was a pull on his strength and a carrier of memories he didn’t want and wouldn’t accept under any conditions.
His departure altered her appearance. She felt taller, bolder, in some ways striking, which a mirror validated. An ash spilled on her way to the window, where she heard foul language. Gustav and another boy had raised fists to each other but were too cowardly to use them, which made their language fouler.
Downstairs, she gathered up her husband’s newspapers and carried them to the kitchen table, where she read headlines and first paragraphs, perused photographs, smiled at a political cartoon, scanned the review of a book she would never buy, read obits of people she didn’t know, and foresaw the sum of her evening on the TV page of the Boston Globe. She was still at the table an hour later when her sons looked in on her, Paul behind them.
“Let her be,” he said.
• • •
“Don’t worry about it,” Regina Smith said when the phone rang and she let it. She enlarged Harley Bodine’s sensitivities. She bared her thighs, and he saw tusks. When she batted her eyes, he saw two dark moments on the face of a high clock. The marriage bed, soon to be sullied, was her idea, which filled him with unkill
able urges and the same sense of marvelously good fortune as when he had captured Kate. “Go do what you have to do,” she said.
In her bathroom he lifted an oval of pristine soap, breathed in the fragrance, and washed his hands. He used her husband’s mouthwash and gargled deep. Suited in light wool appropriate for August, he made undressing an occupation. With his chin tucked in, his fingers particularized each step like someone loosening screws, removing pegs, sliding bolts. Anticipation tensed him.
Stepping from the bathroom, he instantly felt he was under scrutiny and revealing himself as unpleasant and unremarkable. He straightened his shoulders and sucked up the fold from his belly. His part stood erect in a condom, as if masquerading.
She said, in a curiously harsh voice, “I would have done that for you.”
Curtains had been drawn against the evening sun. On the bed she was a torso of lunar white and more of a mystery. When he stumbled in his approach, embarrassment seared his face. Why was he feeling the fool? Standing still, he said, “Who was calling?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Their nakedness more clinical than sensual, they were scanning each other for flaws. He had wilted.
“For God’s sake, take it off.”
Denuded, he drove a shin onto the bed with a force that surprised him and a spasm of confidence that recharged him. His manhood quaked like something astonished by its own audacity. She spoke through the rush of his kiss.
“You smell like Ira.”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s appropriate.”
He kissed the scraped flesh beneath her arms. Nothing was inhibiting. Her navel was a coin a Roman might have hammered into being, and he kissed it for the sheer delight of knowing he was spending another man’s money. With a wrench she placed wealth in his face, forcing him to grapple joyously with his greed, a formidable opponent and an unprincipled fighter. He groped for breath.
“For Christ’s sake, don’t stop!”
When it was time to, actually past the time, he looked up and said, “Does he do that?”
She touched his head where the accurate part in his hair, the chalk of a property line, now ran crooked. “You may want to outdo him,” she said.
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