by Ed Ifkovic
“Frank is very protective of you,” I said to his back.
He paused a second and smiled. “He’s like a father to me, you know. I like him a lot. My real father died before I was born. And my stepfather, Tobias Tyler, is a decent man but he’s not good with children.”
A strange remark, I thought.
“You’re not a child.”
“Well, he’s not good with me. That’s what I should have said.”
“Why?”
We stopped walking, the two of us standing in the empty aisle. Dak’s face was lost in shadows. “Tobias has only two things he loves unconditionally: the evangelical church he founded with—actually for—my mother and…well, my mother herself. His devotion to her borders on rapturous. That kind of love takes up all the air in the room, so he resents what little I inhale.”
“What does he think of Annika?”
No smile now—weariness in his voice. “For him, Annika is a tool to bring me back to the church. I know I sound cynical, and he does encourage a loving marriage, maybe children, but Tobias wants me to keep the church going after he and my mother are gone. His legacy. His ticket to heaven.”
“Then I’d think he’d want you around, no?”
“Around, yes. But not in sight.”
We sat in the back of the empty theater, the last row, under a dim light, his handsome face indistinct and stark: a negative of a grainy photograph. Only those deep-set pale blue eyes shone, and disarmed. He’d slipped into the seat next to me, so close I could detect his cologne: woody, rich, with a hint of new-mown hay.
“I don’t know what you think I can do for you,” I began.
He looked exasperated. “I debated asking Nadine to go to you, and maybe I shouldn’t have. Sometimes my behavior is foolish. But I panicked. Talking to Frank made me panic. And Constable Biggers. I just felt that you understood. I mean, our brief talk at the Full Moon…well…I heard your heartbeat.” He shook his head. “A dumb line, I know. But I need someone who believes in me, I suppose. I know that sometimes I’m…naïve maybe…but I got no one level-headed to talk to. I look over my shoulder and expect to be arrested. My mother cowers, frightened her little boy is gonna be hanged. Tobias turns away, disgusted. Annika watches me warily, ready to pronounce sentence, expecting…I don’t know what. The people who love me don’t know me, and so they…well, can believe me a murderer.” A harsh laugh. “I think Annika’d rather have me arrested for murder than spend time with Nadine.”
“Tell me about Nadine.”
A long pause. “I knew her in Hollywood. Briefly. So brief it almost didn’t happen.”
I rolled my tongue into my cheek. “You know, she says much the same thing. Almost the same words.” I forced him to look at me. “Tell me, Dak, did you love her? Do you love her?”
He stammered, and then smiled. “I got a lot of people in my past, Miss Ferber.”
“That’s not answering my question.”
Helpless, a shrug. “I can’t answer it.”
“And Annika?”
“I’m really not comfortable here, Miss Ferber. Annika has seen me talking to Nadine one time, and she exploded. Not pretty. She got…like out of control. No one knows about Nadine…and Hollywood. I don’t talk about it. It’s just that Annika is afraid of anything not spiritual. You know, people got my life planned for me. Christ, a whole church depends on me—on my coming home to it. When I was thirteen or fourteen, the early days, traveling with my mother, I’d get up there and preach. I was shy but I got into it. My mother was ecstatic. Like a sign from God. She wept. Everyone wept. She saw the future, and I was the blessed one.”
“But…”
“But it was a a game for me. A lark. I was showing off back then. I was a wise-guy prankster. That’s all. That’s not me.”
“And Annika?”
Dak waited a moment. Then he spoke as though reading a script. “She was created in my mother’s image. An orphan girl from Newark. A devout congregant who insinuated her way inside the inner circle, adores my mother, and was chosen to marry me.” A heartbeat. “She’s actually very sweet.”
I bristled. “No, I don’t think that she is.”
That surprised him. “You gotta get beyond the preachy shell.”
“I’d rather not. Sometimes when you crack open a nut, there’s nothing inside.”
“Are you calling…”
I broke in, impatient. “You do have free will, Dak.”
A shrug. “Yes, I like to believe that. But the Assembly of God is an evangelical church that mixes talking in tongues and salvation and forgiveness—all the trappings of tent-city Christianity—with my stepfather’s ironbound Calvinism and boilerplate predestination. Free will is just four-letter words strung together. The wrath of an Old Testament God. The mighty hand of God on my trembling shoulders. Always with the whisper of a benign blessing from Jesus, the lamb of God.”
“Why do you put up with it?”
He got a twinkle in his eyes. “Who says that I do?”
“Well, the evidence, really. You’re still in Maplewood. You’re in the church. You live in town. Lord, you are going to marry Annika.” I smiled. “Or are you?”
“I don’t know what to do. I keep nodding my head at everyone. You know, I had a talk with Annika and I think she might believe that I killed Evan. Imagine that! ‘Where were you?’ she asked me.”
“Did she know Evan?”
“Only as a fool who dared to flirt with her.”
“Why would he do that?”
Dak laughed out loud. “Because she’s a girl. Some men are like that.” He clicked his tongue. “Any girl. He has—had—to have every girl love him.”
“But I gather he mocked Gus Schnelling’s girlfriend, Meaka Snow.”
Dak grimaced. “Lord, the ice maiden. A chilly day of winter, that block of ice. Evan called her an igloo, you know…she’s squat and wide and…”
“So Gus hated him, too?”
“Yes, Gus hated him.” A pause. “And, well, Meaka, too. I know that Evan was stunned to see Gus show up in Maplewood. Picking up that job as electrician. Gus is up to something. Well, so was Evan. They were often together, Gus and Evan, but it was like…like they each didn’t dare let the other guy out of their sight. You gotta know where your enemy is, right?”
“What did Annika say about Gus?”
“She didn’t want him coming around. Either guy, really. Not that he did, but we’d bump into him in town. I mean, Annika has refused to come near the theater—she thinks it’s corrupting. But Gus would be handing out leaflets and, well, he’d strut his manly strut, all that tough-guy nonsense. He’d mutter about the master race or some such nonsense—and we’d keep going. Gus and I don’t talk.”
“You knew him in Hollywood?”
He looked away. “We all knew one another out there. A brief moment…”
I had little patience with that. “Everyone says…‘a brief moment.’ Folderol. Dak, you’re not telling me something. It has to do with Hollywood. Something started there. I feel it. And it led to murder. You and Gus and Evan…even Nadine.”
A downcast evasion. “No.” Then he summarized, “We all ran away from California.”
“And, oddly, you all end up in Maplewood, New Jersey?”
“Funny, no?”
I reached out to touch his wrist and he jerked back. “Actually, no, Dak. There’s a reason all of you came here. And it has nothing to do with the Maplewood Theater. Evan could care less about being Louis Calhern’s understudy in The Royal Family. Nadine came here using her old stage name. In disguise, as it were. Gus, Hitler’s vagrant and mindless follower, does not fit into any group photograph of Maplewood, New Jersey. He belongs in a beer garden in Germantown with a stein in one hand, his other arm outstretched in awful salute.”
“I want you to be my friend,” Dak s
aid suddenly. “I want you to believe I didn’t kill that bastard, Evan.”
We locked eyes for a moment. “I know you didn’t kill him.”
He grinned. “Thank you.”
I noticed Frank stepping out onto the stage, searching across the dim-lit seats, looking for us. “Yes, I do believe you, but you’re not telling me everything.”
A sigh. “I will.” He stood. “Not yet.”
“Dak!” I shook my head.
A broad smile covered his face. “Come with me. Quick. Before Frank yells at me. I am working tonight. Come. It’s my discovery.”
He escorted me out the back door, through the unlighted lobby, and, switching on a hallway light, up the stairs and into a lounge that was someone’s office. “There.” He pointed as he switched on a lamp.
“What?”
“That painting.” He drew me closer and I was staring at a tiny exquisite landscape of a splashy waterfall and ancient weeping willows and spotty moonlight: delicate, luminous, compelling. “I can’t believe it’s here. It’s an Asher B. Durand.” He did a quick two-step, a vaudeville routine, and went, “Ta-da! Look!”
“I have no idea…”
“The great Hudson River Valley landscape painter. He was born in Maplewood when it was Jefferson Village. He died in 1886. He loved landscapes, painted the wild scenery of Orange Mountain. Maplewood is in a valley, you know, and he loved the mountains, wandering through forests of black walnut and pine and…My hero. I just came upon it hanging there, valuable, a museum piece. He’s forgotten now. No one cares. You know, when I was a boy, doodling, drawing, a teacher told me that Durand was a distant relative of my mother, way back when. He’s what made me want to paint and draw.”
“It’s gorgeous,” I agreed.
“I started wandering in the woods, a boy hunting for grasshoppers, but I ended up sketching them. I wandered the same paths, Miss Ferber. You know, there’s an old milestone marker in Maplewood Park beyond Tuscan Road—Five Miles to Newark. Old Indian trails, I imagine. The South Mountain Reservation.”
While we were talking, his face underwent a magical transformation, the dark droopy gloom of his features transmogrifying into a vibrant, mobile boy’s face, electric. His body rolled and twisted, backing up, his face peering closely at the painting, staring into my face, desperately wanting me to understand the awesome beauty of this personal discovery. So alive, so transported, this young man: the artist lost in his own pure world. For a moment, the two of us standing there, quiet, quiet, Evan’s murder did not matter, nor the prosaic machinations of the church he was yoked to, nor the workaday job he had at the theater. And for a moment I forgot about the world out there: Nazi tanks lumbering through Alpine landscapes as beautiful as that of this Durand oil on canvas. No, here was a young man who had found a moment of joy that held him, and, wonderfully, took me with him.
The spell was broken by the sudden appearance of Frank who bustled in, his face scarlet. “Dak. Miss Ferber. What’s going on? This is a private office.”
I simply pointed to the Durand landscape, but Frank refused to look.
“I wanted to…” Dak began.
Frank cut him off. “You need to get back to work, Dak.”
Dak bowed to me, smiled weakly, and sheepishly left the room.
“I’m sorry, Frank.”
“It’s not your fault, Miss Ferber. He’s a troubled boy. An innocent, that one. A decent boy.” He looked toward the empty doorway. “I’m worried about him. I like him. I’m like his father…”
“But you’re not his father.”
He stammered, “I know, I know. It’s just that I don’t like the way people treat him. His family. Evan murdered, and I’m afraid for Dak who is…”
“Who is innocent,” I finished.
Frank breathed out and seemed to lose energy. “Thank God someone else understands that. Thank God.” Then, a pained look. “But why was he following Evan that afternoon? It wasn’t by accident that he spotted Evan. He told me today that he went looking for him. Why can’t he keep his mouth shut?”
Chapter Seven
The voice on the telephone was creaky, yet authoritative. No hello—just “Miss Ferber. Tobias Tyler here.” For a moment I had no idea who the man was. Then Tobias Tyler repeated his name, louder this time, and added, “From the Assembly of God.” Another pause. ”Dakota’s parents.”
I could hear irritation in his tone. This was a man who expected you to know him.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Tyler. This is unexpected.” I’d been sitting in a rocking chair in my room, the New York Times in my lap, unread.
“It shouldn’t be unexpected—it’s just overdue. You see, ever since you and George Kaufman came to town—I don’t attend theater so I was the last to know—I’ve wanted to speak with you. You don’t remember me, but we’ve met, though many, many years back, and only one time. I was a younger man…”
“Tobias Tyler.” My mind wrestled with the name. “Your mother was Maris Bradford Tyler?”
A soft chuckle. “Of course. I’m her only son.”
“You stopped into her apartment…”
“Yes, a brief encounter. My mother liked to gather famous people to her home.”
I cut him off. “I do remember the afternoon.” My voice was cold now. “Not a pleasant memory, I’m afraid.”
He cleared his throat. “I guess she had her biases.”
“And then some.” My words were snarled, purposely.
Again the soft chuckle. “All behind us.” I heard him breathe in. “And I’m not my mother. Her prejudices were unfortunate and…”
“These days transferred onto a world stage, no?” I finished for him.
That confused him. “What?”
“No matter.”
When I’d published So Big to great success and garnered a Pulitzer Prize for Best Novel, the bejeweled grande dames of Park Avenue issued invitations to lunch or tea, a habit of lionizing I soon tired of. George Kaufman referred to it as “artists being fed to the lions.” I’d allowed myself, at George’s suspicious request, to be feted by Mrs. Winthrop Bradford Tyler, an especially rubicund and enormously wealthy widow in her sky-high penthouse. A tiresome woman. “Maris” to her intimates, of which I was not one. Dripping in diamonds and black velvet at midday, Maris Bradford Tyler blathered on and on about her love of the arts, of artists, of So Big (which she heard was wonderful), on and on, dreadful, an eternity, a sinkhole of inanity. At one point George mentioned reading G. B. Stern’s The Matriarch, a wonderful best-selling saga of generations. Mrs. Bradford Tyler heaved her tremendous bosom and roared, “A book about Jews. I tossed it into the fire.”
Silence, long and heavy, as awful as it gets. In my most brutal tone, “And yet you fed me lunch today.”
“You? Jewish?”
George quipped as he threw down his napkin. “Oh my God, Edna. You never told me.”
At which point George and I both stood and stormed out of the apartment.
“Yes,” I told Tobias now, “I remember your mother fondly.”
He wasn’t listening. “I must have been—what?—forty-five? I’m sixty now. An old man.”
“What can I do for you?”
“An invitation to dinner, you and Mr. Kaufman.”
“I don’t think so. We’ve…”
Suddenly a diffident tone colored his words, an urgency, a little desperate. “Please. We need to talk about Dakota and the…the murder. His mother and I…”
Rarely one to forgive the sins of the parent, I nevertheless relented. “I like Dak.”
“You’ll come then?”
“I’ll check with George.”
A pause. “I’ve already spoken with him. He said he’ll come if you do.” That news rankled, truly. What game was this? But now his voice grew strange. “I’ll send a car at seven. One of th
e trusted churchwardens who drives for me. A fine fellow name of Alexander. A safe driver.”
“I’m more leery of what happens after I arrive, sir.”
But he’d already hung up the phone.
***
Tobias Tyler was rich, heir to a fortune built on gas boilers and turbines, a magnificent pile of money that mostly remained intact after the Crash of 1929, though I remembered hearing that he holed up in the Park Avenue penthouse after his mother’s death and was afraid to leave. Well, obviously he had ventured far from that crystal tower. And here he now resided. While waiting for the car to pick us up, George had shared other tidbits of the man’s scant and lucky biography: Tobias, the notorious skinflint—legend had it he’d battled a homeless street bum for a dropped penny—was now spreading his fortune in the name of Christ. The perennial bachelor had been born-again and had fallen madly in love at middle age. “There’s hope for you yet, dear Edna,” George had sniped.
I ignored him. “A strange story.”
“Well, he found God.”
“In Maplewood?” I raised my eyebrows.
“A life with the renowned evangelist, Clorinda Roberts Tyler.”
“Everyone talks about her as if she’s famous. I never heard of her.”
“You need to read the trashy tabloids. The Post loves her.”
“Don’t your letters count as pulp fiction?”
“Wisdom, Edna. I send you bits of wisdom.”
At that moment Alexander pulled up in the town car, and George and I were ceremoniously bowed into the backseat. We didn’t speak for the short ride.
Tobias and Clorinda Tyler lived in a sprawling stone mansion out beyond ritzy Burnett Terrace, an imposing home of excessive gables and medieval stone turrets and heavy leaded glass, stolid and dark, a burgher’s paradisiacal trophy appropriated from an earlier century. An extension, I supposed, of the opulence of Tobias’ genteel Park Avenue upbringing. There was a crew of gardeners in sight, all short and dark, all climbing into the back of a pickup as they ended their day’s work. Italianate lawn statues and Baroque fountains dotted the pathways. Beyond the circular driveway, visible when the car turned, was a two-story Victorian guesthouse set back among towering oak trees, painted a harlot’s red with black shutters and a jazzy white porch, an incongruous ladybug plopped down in the shadow of the sober mansion. Banks of Hawthorne trees lined the rolling fields—and I supposed there was no chance you might ever glimpse a neighbor. Even should you want to.