Beverly said, “There must’ve been some excitement, a certain glamour.”
“Sometimes a little fun.” Smiling over her gin, she told of strolling Fifth Avenue in high-heel suede boots, stark naked under a full-length mink, her arm linked to a man’s.
“The man wanted you to do that?”
“It was Myles. The evening he proposed.”
“Oh, Phoebe, that was romantic. Were you in love?”
“No, but I wanted a different life.”
“Has he been good to you?”
“He doesn’t know who I am. The problem is I know who he is.” She threw her feet off the ottoman and uncoiled from the chair to refill her glass. “Are you sure you don’t want one, Bev?”
“No, I must be clear-headed. I want you to know, Phoebe, I won’t repeat anything you’ve told me. Ever.”
“Don’t fret about it.” Phoebe returned to her chair with less energy, a smile locked into her bruised face. “I’m sure your husband has already let the story out.”
“Yes, that’s something he would do,” Beverly said after a small hesitation. “Was he a client?”
“It’s taken me awhile to place him, but I remember him quite clearly now.”
“Was he disgusting?”
“He wasn’t a gentleman.”
“I’m sorry, Phoebe.”
“Not your fault,” she said, her smile turning mysterious, as if there existed no situation from which she could not disengage herself, if not physically, then mentally. Her feet were back on the ottoman, her ankles crossed. A restful silence grew until Beverly broke it.
“I’ve come to a decision, Phoebe.”
“Have you? I’m glad.”
“I’ve decided to change my life, and I feel quite good about it.”
“Are you leaving Paul?”
“He’s leaving me.”
“Then make sure you have a good lawyer. I don’t recommend Myles. And remember, the only sure thing in a woman’s life is disappointment. Or worse.”
“I’ve had the worst,” Beverly said.
Regina Smith stepped into her daughter’s room. Patricia, watching television, ignored her until a commercial came on. Then she said, “I love him, Mom. You may as well know that.”
Regina bristled. “You think you love him. You’re enthralled with sex.”
“No, I’m enthralled with Tony.”
“The boy’s a fag.”
“No, he isn’t! Only you would say that.”
“But he could be. How do you know anything about anyone in today’s world? You’re a child, Patricia. You don’t have sense, you have whims.”
“I don’t care to discuss it, Mom. I really don’t.”
“Yes, you’re right. You’ll be going back to school soon. You won’t be seeing him, thank God.”
Patricia’s face shot up. “We’ll find ways.”
Regina reared back at the insolence and felt infinitely fatigued and betrayed by forces impinging on her daughter’s life and now on her own. She remembered imagining her uncle’s whole hand going up in flames when he lit wooden matches with a thumbnail. Now she imagined flames engulfing her flesh-and-blood child. “I love you, Patricia.”
“Then let me live.”
She retreated. Downstairs she wandered. Darkness shrouded one room, lamplight opened another. The silence pinged. At an open window a curtain billowed in.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Just sitting,” Ira said, one leg over the other. He was in shirtsleeves, his tie loosened. “Isn’t it time we went to bed?”
“You go ahead,” she said coolly. “I’m not tired.”
His brow wrinkled, as if all his thoughts were uneasy, which did not displease her. It seemed ages ago that she had loved him. He said, “Should I expect you within a reasonable time?”
“I wouldn’t count on it.”
Rising, he attempted a smile, a joke, a poor one. “Punishing me for the sins of the son?”
“You may end up punishing yourself,” she said.
• • •
Soldier drank beer in a bar around the corner from Charles Street, near Massachusetts General Hospital. Part of the time he sat with the nurse he knew. The remote quality of her voice had always placed a distance between them and placed a greater one now that they no longer lived together. She asked how things were going for him with his new friend, and he said he wasn’t sure, too much was up in the air. “She’s complicated,” he said, “like you.”
The nurse, who didn’t intend to be unkind, said, “Maybe you should lower your sights.”
He walked back to Beacon Street, clinking coins in his pocket, passing a homeless man who had kenneled himself in a carton. The sight gave him a chill.
When he entered the apartment with a key he might soon have to surrender, he knew Dudley was back. The air told him. Then Mary Williams’s face did. He said, “Well, what about me?”
“Shh,” she said, “he’s asleep.” She took his arm, ignored the beer on his breath, and edged him into the kitchen. “I’ll make you a nice supper. You’re hungry, aren’t you?”
He laid out dishes in the dining room. She lit candles, instant jewels, then served him and herself an omelette shot with bits of onion, the way he liked it. He said, “You haven’t answered my question.”
“He says you can stay.”
“He says. What do you say?”
“I want you to.”
“The three of us, huh? That what you want?”
“It’ll work,” she said, “if you make the effort.”
He felt he had cards to play. “I don’t like it.”
“It’s your decision.”
He threw his hand in fast. For the first time in his life he feared old age, feared shrinking into a half-life of sicknesses, detested the ugly thought of death. The famous live on in books and movies. The ordinary dead, grunts like himself, just get deader. “We can try it,” he said.
The omelette was delicious, the coffee a choice blend, and he began to relax. She had gone out of her way for him. The nurse never had, had never even pretended to care for him, and had kicked him out unceremoniously. Mary had feelings for him.
She said, “I’ve made a bed up for you on the sofa.”
His face fell. “What?”
“It has to be that way, Soldier.”
“Where’s he sleeping?”
“In his own bed. I’ll be in mine.”
In the dark he lay under a blanket on the sofa, unable to sleep, unable to control his thoughts, every sound from the street an irritation, sometimes a jolt. The anger grew until he could not cope with it.
He stole through the dark, a soldier on a mission, a certain cadence in his creep, armed only with what God had given him.
Over Mary’s bed, he deepened his voice. “This isn’t right.”
“I know,” she said, and made room for him.
• • •
Beverly Gunner entered her house without a sound and turned on only necessary lights, her resolve steeled with the strength of pure purpose. Ascending stairs, she pictured herself as a series of arrangements, of which her breasts were the fiercest, her hips the heaviest, her thighs the meanest. In her bedroom she did her eyes, poked red on her lips, and dabbed scent behind each ear. Her hair, returned to its perfect shell, gleamed gold. In the bathroom she sought something useful, efficient.
Letting light leak in after her, she entered her husband’s bedroom, which smelled both of him and the outdoors. His snores were flutters; moths buffeted the screens. He had kicked half out of the covers, and she saw not the flesh and fat of a man but the near hairless body of a beast ready to be skinned. She had scissors in hand, the kind for cutting hair. When she stabbed him, parts of him jumped. He chomped for air.
She struck again, but he seemed to feel no pain, only surprise, then shock. He couldn’t breathe. Wonderful. He was a man drowning.
He gaped at her in disbelief, tangling a frantic arm in the sheet.
She smelled blood but couldn’t see any, which was frustrating. A knee on the bed, she made another hit, like piercing butter, no positive strike, which was more frustration.
They fought. His lurid face was heated up the way water boils, and hers was merely determined. The clenched scissors again found flesh. She was too large for him. Her hair was a helmet, her thighs were expansive, her hips explosive. Her knee dug in.
“You killed my daughter.”
His fist shot up. It knocked her back but left him with no strength to raise his head.
“Now I’ve killed you,” she said.
13
BEVERLY GUNNER WENT OUT INTO THE DARK, WHERE SHE WAS met by phantom breezes and the restlessness of trees. The night was a symphony. Every insect and tree frog for miles around was making music. The dark air, which would have chilled another woman, warmed her.
She dragged a deck chair along with her and some distance from the house erected it on open ground. A beautiful night, many stars, a chunk of the moon remaining. She sat with her head tipped back and under the spread of the sky viewed history, though all that was visible was the punctuation. A little later, she closed her eyes with a smile, no longer obliged to think deeply about anything, her mind uncluttered, her conscience spotless.
In his bedroom Paul Gunner lay without movement. His mind worked, but his body didn’t. Every muscle was tightening, his universe regressing, contracting. Somehow he moved an arm, found the phone, and straightened a thick finger. His memory for numbers did not desert him. He called the Stoneham home of a doctor in whose health clinic he had a substantial investment. He spoke quickly, his mind moving faster than his words, which tended to grip his tongue.
The doctor, nevertheless, grasped everything.
Gunner said, “You’ll have to restrain her.”
Two silent ambulances and the doctor’s Infiniti arrived in thirty minutes, time enough for him to go into cardiac arrest, but he didn’t. He was breathing with difficulty when the doctor, whose face was sharply cut, the details poignant, scanned his wounds and administered a shot. Two ambulance attendants, both burly, gripped him, said, “Heave ho,” and landed him on the stretcher.
On the way down the stairs, Gunner gave further instructions, wheezing each word. His breath was fire, which reached out and tried to pull the doctor in. “And call Bodine,” he said.
“It can wait,” the doctor said.
“It can’t.”
The attendants loaded him into the ambulance and drove away as silently as they had arrived. The doctor stood with the men from the other ambulance, both black, one tall like a basketball player. The tall one had a gentle voice. “He gonna make it, Doc?”
“If he does, he can thank his blubber. You two find the woman.”
“She’s not in the house.”
They went behind the house and walked the grounds beyond the reach of the floodlights. They called out in one direction, then another, their voices knocking about in the dark. When they came upon her, she rose from the chair. “I don’t believe there’s any blood on me,” she said. “Shouldn’t there be some?”
The tall man approached her first. “You just take it easy.”
“Something really happened, didn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am, something did.”
She smiled. “I was afraid it was only a dream.”
Each man took her by an arm, one firmly, the other gently. At Hanover House, Isabel Williams’s sleep was always broken. If her bladder didn’t wake her, a dream did. She dreamed of a past lover, a jazz guitarist from the forties, the tips of his long playing fingers worn smooth and producing an eerie melody over her skin. The dream, or perhaps a sound from the depths of the building, woke her. Unable to fall back to sleep, she rose, donned a fitted robe, and stepped into the bathroom, where the mirror mocked her with the skin of her stretched face, as smooth as the guitarist’s fingers had been.
She slipped out of her room and in soft slippers traveled the long, well-lit corridor. Here and there a door was ajar, a light on, the occupant unable to sleep without it. Reaching the grand stairway, she paused at the painting of nymphs bathing in a brook. Her eye saw what the guitarist had seen with his some fifty years ago when she was exquisite and he a white woman’s dream.
Downstairs, she entered the common room, where coffee was available through the night for those like herself, the small hours a trial, sanity always a chore. Mr. Skully in silk pajamas was slurping coffee from a mug under subdued lamplight, a cane hooked to the arm of his chair. The trace of smoke that once was his hair was wafting into the light. Always he had something out. This time it was his teeth, which he thoughtfully returned to his face.
“They brought somebody in,” he said in a crusty voice. “Half hour ago. They got Mrs. Nichols up to see to it.”
“Who is it? Anyone famous?”
“A woman. They gave her something. She’s out cold.”
“Where’d they put her?”
“Heard Mrs. Nichols say the third floor.”
She poured coffee from a Silex, half a cup, and carried it with her to the birdcage elevator. Any break in routine was a gift. Any hint of drama was cherished. In the elevator she sipped her coffee and smoothed her hair. On the third floor, some distance down, she approached an open door and heard low voices. A nurse stood at one side of the occupied bed, Mrs. Nichols at the other. Mrs. Nichols’s robe was satin, and the glint from her round glasses was sharp.
“What are you doing here, Mrs. Williams?”
She craned her neck for a look at the face in the bed. She saw a crushed helmet of hair and features supremely at rest. “Good Christ, that’s Hilda’s daughter-in-law.”
“Let’s keep it to ourselves,” Mrs. Nichols said.
“Is she alive?”
“She’s quite alive.”
“You sure? She doesn’t look it.”
“Take my word for it.”
“Who’s going to tell Hilda?”
“I’ll attend to it, Mrs. Williams. In the morning.”
Clasping her coffee cup in both hands, she took the staircase down to the second floor. A line of light lay under Hilda Gunner’s door. With a rap, she entered the room. Mrs. Gunner, a childish sight, was occupied.
“Jesus Christ, Hilda, why use that when you have a perfectly good toilet?”
“This is my place, I’ll do what I want.”
“I had something to tell you, but it can wait.”
“Tell me now,” Mrs. Gunner demanded.
“They brought your daughter-in-law in. Feet first.”
• • •
Harley Bodine, who had got little sleep but was as fresh and alert as ever, arrived in Boston early, law offices of Phelps, Fin-berry and Monk, where he was valued for his close association with Paul Gunner, through the years an esteemed client worth his weight in gold. Bodine worked twenty minutes at his desk and then called in a young associate. He tossed a sturdy folder across the desk and said, “Think you can handle it on your own, Winger?”
“No problem,” the young man said.
Bodine threw out another folder. “This needs tighter language. Don’t fudge, you understand?”
“Yes, sir. No problem.”
Bodine stared at the part in Winger’s hair, as precise as his own. Winger was a Dartmouth grad and had a smooth face pink with confidence. Bodine trusted his brain but nothing else about him. “I’ll be with Mr. Gunner all day. Double-bill him.” Bodine shut a drawer and rose. “How come everything’s no problem for you? Things that easy for you, Winger?”
“There are always ways of doing things, sir. You taught me that.”
Some minutes later, in traffic, his well-polished BMW purred for him as no woman ever had, though he had passionate hope for Regina Smith, who could invade his thoughts without warning, her image vivid one instant and wavering the next, as if she were a gift that might be taken from him. He steered onto
a ramp. No other woman, not Kate, not his first wife, had had such a hold on him. Merely thinking about her made him large.
On the interstate, he drove with uncustomary speed, slowing only when the number of lanes diminished. Regaining too much speed, he had to swerve to avoid overshooting the Stoneham turnoff.
The medical clinic lay beyond a stand of maples with great sprawls of leaves, some turning before their time. He parked in a reserved space, not for him, near an electrical contractor’s van, and entered the building through a sleek double door. The doctor was waiting for him beyond the reception desk. In the doctor’s office, he said, “Is he going to make it?”
“He’s a lucky man. I’m concerned about infection, but I don’t think we have too much to worry about. We set up a special room for him.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“I don’t know if he’s awake. We just gave him more medication.”
Alone in Gunner’s room, Bodine leaned over him. Gunner’s head was deep in a pillow, his face flattened out and yellowish. The eyes burned. He looked like a man unable to die. He gave Bodine instructions in torn whispers. He could not wipe his mouth. Bodine did it for him. “The boys,” he said.
“Yes, I’ll arrange it.” Bodine stepped back. “I’ll let you rest.”
With what could not have been a smile, too much of a twist, Gunner said, “She’s certifiable.”
“Yes, that’s a plus.”
He drove to Andover, to Phillips Academy, parked beyond the Andover Inn, where he had occasionally taken Kate to dinner, and bumped into Ted Pitkin before he had a chance to look for him. Pitkin was with three students, who went on their way. “This is a surprise,” Pitkin said, smiling out of his beard. Bodine led him to a bench.
“Mr. Gunner’s sons have been here since yesterday. He’s due to pick them up this afternoon.”
“I know,” Pitkin said. “They’re at the gym. Volleyball. They’re not skilled, but they show spirit.”
“Mr. Gunner would like you to look after them for a few days. I’m sure there’s dormitory space.”
“Of course. Most certainly.” Pitkin wore no socks. His ankles ran raw into tennis shoes. “Is anything the matter?”
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