“For dogs, not horses.”
“Too bad.” Mooney drained his rum punch. “Don’t care much for dogs.”
“Rudy and I used to come here every winter.”
“Baumholz was a sport. We all know that.”
“There, there,” Fritzi frowned. “Do I detect a note of nastiness?”
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Think he’d approve of me?”
“Probably not. He hated cops.”
“Can’t say I blame him.”
“And he’d certainly take a dim view of our living arrangements.”
“A puritan, was he?”
“In a manner of speaking. But it never prevented him from having a good time. Rudy loved good times and woe unto the poor devil who’d try to get in the way of his.”
Mooney cocked an eye at her. “That how come you shanghaied me down here? You figured I needed a good time?”
“That and a few other reasons. Number one, you look tired; and number two, you deserve a rest. I don’t want to hear anything more about Mr. Quintius or Mr. Watford, or Dowd or Mulvaney or any of that lot. We’re here for a week and, by God, we’re going to rest and enjoy ourselves. Understood?”
“Understood.” They clicked their glasses. “Now what say to another noggin of rum before bed?”
“They’re about four hundred calories apiece.”
“But they sure do put you in the proper frame of mind for relaxation.”
She gazed at him merrily out of the corner of her eye. “Well, since it’s the first night of vacation, we’ll make an exception. However, let’s resolve something right now. You came down here at 175 pounds and you’re going back home at 175 pounds. Not an ounce more. Understood?”
“Understood.” Mooney flagged the waiter.
When their drinks came they toasted each other. The warm evening, the swim and the rum had already had a salutary effect on Mooney’s color. He had indeed begun to forget Quintius, Watford and all the rest. He suddenly noted how pretty Fritzi’s red hair was when it was wet.
76
In the days that followed they swam, snorkled, ate moderately and gambled indifferently at the hotel casino. When they were not down at the beach, they were crisscrossing the island in a rented red Peugeot.
One day they drove north out over the Chalk Mountains up narrow, tortuous little roads slicing across the cane fields and down through little parishes dotted with ancient stone kirks and pink and green shanties, enclosed by neat white picket fences, swathed in bougainvillaea. Hens, goats and cows munched plantain and ginger lilies beside rickety porch railings. In the little villages children in immaculate blue-white uniforms straggled in column formation along the road to school.
The Peugeot climbed higher into the steep green hills, plunged down precipitous slopes, winding its noisy way through dark forests of gnarled mahogany and writhing banyan trees.
They were on a long, seemingly endless ascent now out of a damp gloomy canyon, Fritzi radiant beneath a floppy sunbonnet and Mooney, tan and beachy in faded denim Bermudas and a straw plantation hat. Cresting the hill, the engine whined in second gear. Then, suddenly, like a door opening, a wide expanse of sea loomed up ahead. They’d crossed from the Caribbean to the Atlantic and come down on the stormy northern coast of the island in the ancient parish of Bathsheba.
The days were all like that—a long unbroken succession of perfect cloudless skies, the invariable noontime shower, followed by the bright benevolent sun that browned their flesh and baked the February ache from out of their bones. After three days they had the leathery, bleached and salted look of the inveterate islander. At night they slept naked in each other’s arms, the sliding glass doors opened to the flagged terrace where their bathing suits dried on the rail. The tree frogs piped and silken breezes rising off the softly lapping water murmured through the feathery branches of the pine overhead.
Each morning on their terrace the island sparrows hopped up boldly on the breakfast table, darted at toast crumbs and dipped their beaks into the cream pitcher. Fearless, brazen, they plundered crumbs of pastry and French toast directly off the plates. At dusk, the same birds would hop about the pool, lively and playful, occasionally tipping their heads sidewards at a ninety-degree angle to drink from a thin puddle left in the tiled wake of some recent bather’s dripping instep.
The Barbadian bartender who confected their predinner swizzles greeted them with a sly conspiratorial smile. He knew all about them but insisted upon calling them Mr. and Mrs. Mooney. His name was Patrice, and when they got married, suddenly, inexplicably (even to themselves), the next day, Patrice was their best man.
He came to the stone kirk in Saint James in a fresh white tropical suit and a faded blue shirt with a black tie. He carried a huge bouquet of island calla lilies, and his shiny black face beamed with wicked amusement. “I know all along. I know the moment I see you, you would do something foolish like this.”
Mooney gazed in helpless wonderment at his elegant best man. Standing there in the rector’s office of the little kirk, he had a queer vision of the old apartment on 161 Street, with its unmade bed and the suitcases of unlaundered clothing lying all about the floor. In the space of milliseconds a multitude of images reeled off before his eye, then passed forever— Mostly they rose from the squalid wreckage of his past—police squad rooms, all-night hamburger joints, the terrifying clatter of El trains running past the windows in the frozen winter nights, cold suppers taken by himself in the stale, unventilated air of a roachy little pullman kitchen. Oddly enough, there was a sense of loss. It had been a life. It had gotten him through. Now sixty-three, he looked at Fritzi, radiant in the simple white dress she’d bought that morning in Bridgetown, and resented whatever happiness she’d known before him. Patrice laughed and strode before them while all the hurtful, angry ghosts of times past retreated sullenly from the field.
For the occasion of his marriage, Mooney wore jeans and a navy brass-buttoned blazer. The preacher who married them was a crisp slightly reproving octogenarian in black tunic and starched white dickey. His voice intoned the ancient service in a high singsong, and as Mooney slipped his old police academy ring onto Fritzi’s trembling finger, the old man pronounced them man and wife.
That evening at the hotel the management laid on a wedding banquet—champagne, roast pig, okra, christophine, shrimp creole, banana cream pie and liqueurs. Hardly a Spartan regimen for a self-denying, youth-pursuing middle-aged couple, who measured out their calories each day with gram scales and coffee spoons. So it came to pass. Fritzi and Mooney were at long last one.
That night as they lay in each other’s arms, he said to her, “All that crap about my health and all. You lulled me with warm weather and rum. You seduced me.”
“Nothing is forever, Mooney,” she murmured into the warm crook of his neck. “Anytime you want to go, you go. No lawyers. No problems. That goes for me, too. Understood?”
“Understood.”
There seemed nothing further to discuss. That night, however, Watford returned to him in the form of dreams, though in what connection he was never quite sure.
The dominant image was a bubble of molten sun hanging low in the sky. Something like a mote or a fleck of dust appeared in the sun’s upper-right-hand quadrant, then seemed to hurtle toward him, growing larger and larger. The scene repeated itself over and over again—that infinitesimal spot of black zooming toward him at a frightening velocity, growing, multiplying in size like some rapidly approaching meteor until it threatened to crush him.
He awoke, sitting bolt upright in bed, dazzling spokes of sun thrusting through the bamboo louvers, the sparrows and killdeers peeping and foraging on the terrace, clamoring for their breakfast.
When they departed, Mooney was a different man from the one who had arrived several days earlier, pale and harried, on a night flight from New York. Tan, almost lean, dressed in the navy business suit he’d worn down, the muscles in his face were strikingly taut.
The hotel
management had presented them with a farewell bottle of French champagne. When the taxi had come to take them to the airport, Patrice pinned an orchid corsage to Fritzi’s lapel. After they’d taken off, the flight attendant, who called them Mr. and Mrs. Mooney, chilled their champagne, then came back and served it.
They drank several glasses, chatting easily as the plane droned smoothly along with the white-hot tropic sun reflecting off its aluminum wings. Mooney turned and stared out at the fleecy white cumulus clouds hanging motionless in the limpid sky. Behind him he watched the green line of shore receding in the distance and had an intimation of impending misfortune. He was unaccountably sad. Fritzi had no wish to violate his privacy, but in an instant she had divined the source of difficulty.
“Quintius?” she murmured softly.
He turned and gazed at her in quiet surprise.
It was the first of March when they got back to New York. The weather was unseasonably warm and humid.
Reporting to the squad room at Manhattan South the following day, Mooney found a message from Dr. Ramsay on his desk. He called Beth Israel and was put through at once to the doctor. Watford had disappeared from the hospital. Just got up one evening and walked out. They were trying desperately to locate him. Without his daily medication, he would surely die.
Ramsay had called the sister in Pittsburgh. She had no idea where he was. She was busy and appeared to resent the call. Ramsay asked her to come to New York to help find her brother. She hemmed and hawed, was embarrassed and apologized. In the end she cried, but still she would not come. She tried to explain something about her husband, but then just hung up.
Mooney promised to get on it at once. Ramsay was grateful and offered one last detail. Watford had left Mooney a message in a sealed envelope. Should he mail it up to the precinct? No, Mooney said, he’d drop by that evening and pick it up on his way home.
It was nearly 5:00 P.M. when he arrived. Ramsay was not there, but the floor nurse recognized Mooney at once. She waved him over to the desk and handed him an envelope with his name scrawled across the front. “Dr. Ramsay left this for you.”
Once again Mooney experienced that premonition of impending misfortune as he tore open the envelope. Inside was a message written in a faint, wavery hand, so slight it appeared to be receding along with its author into time and trackless distance.
It had been written two days before, and to Mooney’s great disappointment turned out to be scarcely revelatory. Just an exhortation cast in a wry, slightly ghoulish tone.
“Happy summer solstice and greetings from the grave,” he said. “Don’t quit now. You’re ever so near.”
That night and for several weeks after, squads of handpicked men went out from Manhattan South, pouring through the underbelly of the city for some clue to the whereabouts of Charles Watford.
77
Green sepals, silver thin. The calyx clenched tight as a fist. A shudder. The sense of momentous turmoil underneath. A tremulous quake within the pod. Waves of shock radiating outward through rubbery aerial stems. A pause, as if for rest. The action resuming. The breathless exertion of birth. One of the calyx whorls pops. The seam along it starts to tear.
Shortly, the plant, nearly four feet tall, nods as if some unseen presence had just brushed past. The motion is hesitant, barely perceptible, belying the great torsion of natural forces at play behind it.
The tear along the seam descends, followed by another, then a new sepal rips along the line of the calyx. From within its loosening fist, a gash of white flashes, followed by a faint, yet vivid exhalation of something lemony, acrid. Shortly a thin fissure appears along the length of the pod. The long aerial stems appear to sway and brush past each other, then resume a kind of quivering stasis.
From within the slowly widening fissure an expanse of dazzling white is stirring. Pristine white— the white of snow before the desecration of earth. Fringes of that white poke their unruly way through the tearing wound, forcing the side of the calyx to rupture with an audible snap. The tight white bloom within uncoils slowly through the break as though a length of silk wrapped tight as a ball were suddenly released.
The outer sepals had been green; those on the inner side were of a delicate lavender and gold. Spent and drooping, the two dangle open, then fall away.
The new bloom itself, extravagant, gleaming white, is fully thirteen inches in diameter, its petals damp and still unfurling, panting from its recent labors. The air is suddenly suffused with something heavy, overpowering, almost cloyingly sweet.
Suddenly there is a burst of applause. The flash of cameras. Cheers and laughter. The popping of a champagne cork.
“Bravo.”
“Fantastic.”
“Mystical. Almost religious.”
“Creepy, I’d say. Something dark and awful about it. I don’t like it.”
“Have you never seen a foaling? It’s just like that. Mysterious. Terrifying. Downright beautiful, too. How the hell did you know exactly when, Peter?”
“When? By God, he had it timed right down to the second.”
“He always knows. He has it rigged. I’ve always suspected some hocus-pocus. Come on, Peter. Fess up.”
More laughter. More uncorking. More wine. People crowding about the large terra-cotta pot where the succulent, with its extraordinary white bloom, glowed with a strange, unearthly translucence.
Peter Quintius basked in the glow of approval generated by the assembled company.
“Valuable secrets are intended for transmission only at precisely the right moment,” he remarked sententiously. A wan, troubled smile played about the edges of Isobel Quintius’s mouth. As friends and relatives flocked around she sipped champagne with an air of amused distraction.
Quintius continued to answer questions evasively. Enjoying the pose of being cryptic, he preferred to create intriguing puzzles rather than shed light. He had raised the startling cactus from infant shoots, nurtured it tenderly through its first two or three uncertain years, ministered to it daily, until now it stood several feet tall, its rubbery, tentacle branches arching toward him.
The fact that his family was there to share the glory of the moment made it all that much better. Amid wife and children, brothers and nieces, nephews and grandchildren, Peter Quintius was a revered, hence deeply resented figure. The undeclared but tacitly acknowledged godhead of the great tribe of Quintius, there were many who felt an obligation to be grateful to him.
As patriarchs go, he looked the part perfectly. Tall, whip-thin, erect as the spar of a schooner, with a rich mane of undulant white hair, he was an arresting presence. On Madison Avenue in New York, on Curzon Street in London, on the Quai D’Orsay in Paris, his prestigious Quintius Galleries, where one could purchase a Vermeer or a Van Gogh as readily as a priceless French impressionist, were unmistakably the hub of the international art market.
His work itself demanded that he live a life of conspicuous privilege. A Sixty-second Street town house in New York, an apartment in London and, of course, the ancestral seat—a seventeenth-century farmhouse high on a breeze-tossed bluff above Long Island Sound on the North Shore at Cold Spring Harbor.
The first generation of Quintiuses had come to the New Land on the earliest wave of Dutch migration in 1680. Quintius’s great-great-great grandfather, Henryk, had built the farmhouse in 1683, paying at that time twelve cents an acre for each of the 130 acres he’d purchased from a Pequot chieftain called Bilbahhot. One of Quintius’s most prized possessions was the original, now crumbling parchment deed that lay in the family vault at the Morgan Guaranty Trust.
Since Henryk’s time generations of Quintiuses had inhabited the house, each adding to it something architecturally consonant with the original structure. Quintius himself had added porticoes and pergola-covered flagged verandas, gardens and topiary and the huge, stone and glass greenhouse cantilevered out from the rose-brick north wing built by his grandfather during the Federal period.
It was in this very greenhouse b
ursting with blooms of every conceivable sort—camellias, hybrid roses, row upon row of orchids—that the Quintius family had gathered shortly before midnight to observe the one-night-a-year appearance of the nightblooming cereus. The single bloom, born just before midnight, all dewy and quaking with new life, would be dead before midday tomorrow.
Each year since he’d grown it, Quintius celebrated the one-night-a-year blooming with a family party. How he was able to select the precise night of the blooming, what intuition and special affinity he enjoyed with the strange cactus, no one could say. When pressed on the subject, Quintius would nod sagely, but he would offer nothing in the way of concrete answers.
Later that evening Quintius awoke abruptly from his sleep, consumed with the notion that he’d been summoned. It was somewhere near 3:00 A.M. A thick mist came rolling in off the Sound and a foghorn boomed mournfully like some lost and stricken creature out on the water.
The wind was afoot that night. It swept in off the Sound, growling and sobbing about the corners of the house, like some sad, fretful thing full of a deep grievance it was intent upon correcting.
Quintius peered into the dark—into a room he did not at once recognize. The bed, the dresser, the small divan with a silk robe thrown across its back, the skylight above him, showing a broad expanse of star-filled sky, were all, for a fearful moment, part of a landscape utterly foreign to him. And the small delicate figure deep in sleep beneath the quilts beside him was that of a person he’d never seen before. Like a man who’d stumbled inadvertently into some stranger’s world, he was frightened.
Slowly, his orientation returned. The robe across the divan he recognized as his own, and the measured breathing rising from beneath the quilt gave off the comfortably familiar scent of Isobel’s nighttime creams and lotions. He was aware that his mouth seemed unnaturally dry, parched even. Then he recalled that he’d been dreaming and that it was doubtless the dream that had jarred him from sleep.
Night-Bloom Page 36