“I don’t understand you,” she said. “A man steals from you, you protect him.”
“A scandal would have cost us more. We hope to recoup some of the money from him. Not all, I grant you.”
“Small punishment, Ira. In other words, no punishment at all. Is that how you intend to deal with Anthony?”
Adjusting his horn-rims, he looked out the window. His son, wearing only shorts, was stretched out on a chaise with a book. With affection and admiration he gazed at the healthy glow of Anthony’s body and hoped the years would not dim it too soon. “I’d rather handle the situation in my own way, Regina.”
“What way is that?”
He wished he could remove himself from her stare. She was driving a nail. “I can’t cast him out, Regina. He’s not Ishmael.”
“He raped my daughter.”
“It wasn’t rape. It couldn’t have been.”
“Statutory rape.”
“They’re both minors.”
“Something has to be done,” she said and pushed her chair back.
He went outside, where white roses frothed under a sky that looked as if it had gone gray for good, the air warm and unsettled. Canada geese passing over the house sounded like a conference that had got out of hand. Anthony jumped to his feet. They stood face to face, father and son, and talked quietly, man to man.
“It wasn’t that way, Dad.”
“I know it wasn’t.”
• • •
The cover of the book was mildewed, and pages clung precariously to the buckram. May Hutchins carried it with great care. She had meant to return it to the library but instead settled on a bench on the green and read from it. Jenny Wren was a little busybody, Peter Rabbit an irresponsible love, and Reddy Fox a rascal easily forgiven. So easily she could fancy herself dipping a bare toe into the Smiling Pool and drinking from the Laughing Brook, the water purer than from her tap. She would have read another chapter had a shadow, jagged at the edges, not fallen over her.
“Improving your mind, May?”
She slapped the book shut and planted a hand over the cover. “No,” she said, “pleasing it.”
Hands on his hips, Reverend Stottle stood tall and tilted while she tried to ignore him. “Is Roland feeling better?”
“Roland has his good days and his bad ones, like all of us. Don’t tell me there aren’t times you don’t feel like going to church.”
“Not a morning goes by I don’t feel like staying in bed, but Jesus calls, your savior and mine.”
“Yours, Reverend. My sins I cherish.”
“He died for you, May.”
“Damn presumptuous of him. He shouldn’t have done it.”
“You’re putting me on,” Reverend Stottle said, all smiles. He sat beside her, which she didn’t want. “Besides, what sins do you have?” he said, as if hers would be too inane for discussion.
“I’m two-timing Roland, would that be sin enough?”
“Yes,” he said, with more smiles, “if it were true.”
He sensed no mystery in her, for which she despised him. She wanted to slap his face. Her voice unpleasant, she said, “How about you? You have any sins worth repeating?”
“I sin in heart and mind, but I’m on my knees at night. Jesus hears. He’s always within earshot. And you, May?” His voice seemed inside her where she couldn’t spit it out. “Are you on your knees?”
“Not the way you think.”
“Are you trying to shock me, May?” He had a way of looking at her with his whole face. “You’re troubled, aren’t you?”
“What do you think of God?” she said. “You think he’s doing a good job?”
“Between you and me, May?” With a different sort of smile, he laid a finger against the side of his nose. “It’s a good thing his office isn’t elective.”
She no longer wanted to slap him and felt instead a touch of sympathy. What kind of life did he have, preaching on Sunday and poking about the rest of the week with a voice full of irrelevancies?
“The fact is, May, God made the world in such a manner that leaves a bit of a lie in every truth. Any reputable scientist will tell you that.”
He spoke nonsense bound to get on anybody’s nerves. Looking away, she felt a quickness on her skin from a change in the air. The day had dimmed. Reverend Stottle shot to his feet.
“It’s going to rain.”
“Let it,” she said.
“You’d better come on, May. You’ll get soaked.”
She felt a drop and brought the book to her bosom. The reverend scurried off, and after a few moments she left the bench and took shelter under a billowing red maple. The shower was brief, hardly enough to kiss the leaves.
• • •
Chief Morgan secluded himself in his office, sat himself behind an old manual typewriter, and summarized suspicions and doubts about the derelict who called himself Dudley and seemed to claim responsibility for the deaths of an adolescent named Glen Bodine and a child named Fay Gunner — claims that seemed to implicate a parent of each victim. The summary ran six pages, single spaced, and was long on supposition and short on facts. In postscript, he wrote: “Dudley’s gone again, and I don’t know if he’s worth looking for. The truth is, I don’t know which way to move.”
He stapled the pages together and stashed them in a bottom drawer. Stepping out of his office, he said to Meg O’Brien, “I’m going to lunch, then home. Anything major comes up, call me. Otherwise you handle it, but let Eugene think he’s doing it.”
“Don’t I always?”
“No, you give him the pin.”
“That’s to get him off his ass.” She scrutinized him, like an older sister. “You’re acting funny.”
“It’s how I always act, Meg. You just haven’t noticed.”
The knotty pine paneling at the Blue Bonnet was permanently stained with grease from the grill. The blackboard menu, the fare virtually unchanged in decades, was screwed to a wall. It was past the lunch hour, no one sitting at the counter. Morgan crunched crackers into a bowl of clam chowder. Malcolm Crandall, consuming a cheeseburger, ignored him, which was just as well. Ben Foxx, sitting closer, looked at him out of an age-spotted face. Years ago Ben had been a reporter for a now-defunct Boston paper when it had morning and evening editions. Ben had worked the bulldog, never a byline. He said, “Anything happening, Chief?”
“You’d be the first to know.”
“Good, paper’s practically put to bed. I wouldn’t want to tear a page apart.”
The chowder was salty. “I wouldn’t ask you to do that.”
Malcolm Crandall said with a full mouth, “Ask him whatever happened to that tramp, Ben.”
“What tramp’s he talking about, Chief?”
“Beats the hell out of me, Ben,” Morgan said and didn’t finish his soup. His water glass he emptied with a silent swallow.
At home, plumping a pillow and stretching out on the sofa, he began watching a vintage movie, Deborah Kerr playing a young Irishwoman duped by a Nazi spy. Halfway through, he fell asleep and woke in a sweat to credits creeping onto the screen. He read them all. Then he got up and made a phone call. If the voice was male, he intended to hang up. The voice was Beverly Gunner’s.
He said to her, “I’ve been working it and reworking it, and I can’t believe someone would want his child done away with. It goes against the grain.”
“You shouldn’t worry about it, James. It’s my problem.”
“No,” he said. “It’s a police matter. I mean, if it’s that at all.”
“He’s a genius. He thinks he can do anything he wants.”
“I’m worried about you.”
There was a silence. Then she said, “That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me in years.”
Paul Gunner drove his sons to Andover and dropped them off at the academy for preterm activities. Then, back in Bensington, lunching at the country club, he stuffed himself. His stomach, an avalanche, lay in his lap. When Anne Lapierre,
dining with Regina Smith, stopped at his table, he was a politician with his impromptu smile.
“God, you’re lovely. Tell Armand he’s the luckiest man alive.”
When he returned home he avoided his wife. His shirt off, he was a sea of moving flesh. He dropped his trousers, donned voluminous Bermuda shorts, and padded out to the pool, where he filled a collapsible chair and thumbed a copy of Fortune.
His eyes blinking at the glossy page, he read an article on the hubris and suspicious death of newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell, never a hero of his, merely a foreign upstart with an Anglicized name. Tossing the magazine, he prided himself in living without backward glances, no memories capable of disturbing his sleep. Closing his eyes, he slept.
He slept an hour and the better part of another one when the collapsible chair bent, twisted, and splintered under his weight. He rose from the shambles rubbing his back and looking for someone to blame: no one in sight.
In the house he listened for his wife and heard nothing. He wasn’t even sure she was home. He was nursing his hurts and watching television in his study when she appeared in the doorway, dressed to step out, though her golden shell of hair was tippy. She was letting herself go. Yet never had he seen her looking so attractive.
“The boys won’t be home till tomorrow,” he said, but she was not interested. The expression on her face was airy, opaque, unexplained, the same expression she had shown when manifestly pregnant. He said, “You going somewhere?”
“Phoebe’s.”
This mutinous attitude was a phase of hers, unsustainable. He looked at his watch. Five o’clock. “I want you back by seven,” he said.
“You want me back by seven?” Her voice was low. Her eyes showed that her mind was working. “Do you know what seven means to me, Paul? The number of fingers you have left after sticking three up your ass.”
• • •
They met at the Marriott. Harley Bodine had booked the room from Boston, left his office early, and was waiting for her when she arrived. Entering the room, Regina Smith seemed only vaguely in her clothes and soon, he knew, would be out of them. His mind whirled over boundaries that such a short time ago had lain one way and now meandered in different directions.
“I thought you might not want to see me again,” he said.
“What gave you that idea?”
He fumbled for something clever to say and then simply smiled. The nearly imperceptible cast in one eye added to her allure and doubled his excitement. The single noise in his head was her name.
“Let’s not stand on formality,” she said, glancing at her watch.
He loosened his tie. The delicious novelty and stunning achievement of the first time could not be repeated, but now there was this time, which also would never be repeated. Her breasts, abruptly gaining their freedom, frolicked for a moment.
“A story about Phoebe is going around the country club,” she said. “Remind me to tell you about it later.”
He had an uncle who played the accordion and got people dancing. He wondered whether she’d care to hear about that. A man’s rough cough came through the wall. The cough had depth and gravel and grated on their ears.
“I hope the walls don’t have eyes,” she said.
She was on the bed, the covers peeled back. What had been etched in his brain was now before the eye again. He had a great desire to know what she looked like in the morning, whether her face was puckered and splotched or pure enamel as it was now.
“Easy,” she said, for he was overanxious, ubiquitous, addicted.
Later — he couldn’t help himself — he questioned her.
“It was good, Harley. Take my word for it.” The man in the next room had quit coughing. Maybe he had left. “Thank God,” she said.
They lay apart. He appropriated her hand, confidence in his grip, and told her about his uncle and a certain musical ability that ran in the family. He had played piano as a boy. Gradually, without realizing it at first, he began talking about his first wife, who had gotten the better of him in the divorce. He had been obliged to deal generously with her because his firm insisted on utmost probity when its members’ personal lives were exposed to the public.
“I can see how that caused problems,” Regina said. She had a cramp in her knee. Would he mind moving a bit?
“Sorry,” he said, shifting, still holding her hand. “Glen’s medical bills were bleeding me. Insurance doesn’t pay for everything. And he wanted to go to medical school. That would have been throwing money into the grave.”
“There was no hope for him?”
“None.” Bodine sighed heavily. “The accident was a blessing, I guess. It ended his suffering.”
“If I were dying,” she said, “I’d want to get it over with. None of this hanging around, stringing it out.”
“I’ve learned to view the accident as God’s will.”
“God’s?”
“Yes,” he said, looking at her sharply.
“Don’t upset yourself,” she said and kissed him, their joined hands coming between them. He wanted her again.
• • •
Dudley had returned. He started to speak, but Mary Williams put a finger to his lips. “Just let me look at you.” She believed they had joined hands in a previous life and had reunited in this one. She stroked his hair. So much to be said, so much that needn’t be. Always they had divined the most important of each other’s thoughts, which now disquieted her.
“Who’s living here?” he asked.
She spoke quickly. “Soldier, you remember Soldier.”
They were in the kitchen. He looked about, as if something were missing. “The toaster belongs next to the bread box. He’s moved things around.”
“He won’t again. I promise.”
His smile was a thin glint. “Are you sleeping with him?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “I don’t mind.”
“It doesn’t mean anything.”
“I know that,” he said and touched her cheek, warmed his whole hand against it. “I missed you.”
“I missed you more,” she said and made him sit down. “Where did you get those shoes?” Crouching, she loosened them and pulled them off, along with socks she didn’t recognize, and counted his toes like a mother fearful her newborn might not be sound. “You need a bath.”
Hot water steamed the bathroom and misted chrome and mirrors. When he eased into the tub, she scrutinized him, again like a mother, to make sure he was intact. She poured water over his head, put suds in his hair, and massaged his scalp. She cleaned an ear, the debris like the black chunk of seeds inside a poppy, and she soaped the back of his neck and shoulders. When he lifted an arm, she soaped him there. “I borrowed ten dollars,” he said. “Did you pay him back?”
“John? Yes.”
“Do you want to tell me where you’ve been all the rest of the time?”
He took the soap from her and used it on his chest. He straightened his back. Quite suddenly he was more his grown self. “I had many places to stay. One was a gazebo. Another was a chicken coop.”
“You’re fooling.”
“I’m not.” He soaped a sponge and squeezed it over his shoulders. “Mostly I was in a jail cell.”
“Now I hope you’re fooling,” she said with a shudder. “We’ll talk about it later.”
“Yes, later,” he said. Alone, he soaked for a while and then dried himself in a luxurious towel. He dressed himself in the clothes she had laid out. A shirt that fitted him. Lightweight trousers that remembered him. Slippers that greeted him. He used a blower on his hair.
She smiled broadly when he returned to the kitchen. “You’re your old self, I can tell.” Her eyes went to him. “I want you to stay this way. No more of that awful business.”
“The money is important.”
“You pay a bigger price.” She moved closer. “Face it, Dudley, you go off the deep end.”
“No, I don’t.” His face was luminous from the repeating lights of his eyes. �
�I swim.”
• • •
Phoebe Yarbrough had been drinking, the best gin and tonic, more than enough to give her a glow. Wearing a silk shirt tucked into denim shorts, she stood tall and erect on legs that looked like bright spears. “Sure you won’t have one, Bev?”
“No, I need to be perfectly sober,” Beverly Gunner said from the depth of a large upholstered chair. “Are you sure Myles can’t hear us?”
“Positive.”
“Then please, Phoebe, tell me more about your life back then.”
Memories pelted her. She wore a bra under the silk but nothing under the denim. The fly was neglected, and feminine hair escaped like down from a milkweed pod. “You’ve heard, I’m sure, how the overbred Englishman pants for the blood of a fox. Well, that’s not a bad analogy.”
“That’s the way they were with you?”
“The older ones.”
“But they were good to you.”
“They had to be. That was a rule.” She took a sip of gin and settled in a wing chair, placing her feet on an ottoman. Her white canvas shoes were long and narrow. “I never tolerated vulgarity.” She took another sip. “Some wanted to videotape me. I never allowed that.”
“Then it wasn’t all fun.”
“It was work, that’s all it was. The challenge was to make the man think you enjoyed every minute of it.” Her head dropped back for a moment, with a random thought of her father, his hands weathered by coins, the constant traffic at his toll booth. She remembered the roughness of those hands on her arms, her legs.
“Most,” she continued, “came on too strong, wanted too much, as if money bought everything. But they were all manageable and predictable. Men who’d married virgins, more or less, far as they knew, wanted me in white lingerie. Repeat honeymoons. Guys long dissatisfied wanted me in black.”
“You must’ve learned so much.”
“I did a short story about it for my writing class. The professor was one of my clients. Needless to say, I got an A.” Sitting with splayed knees, she glanced down and made a face. “Why didn’t you tell me?” She patted herself in and fixed the fly.
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