Swan Dive

by Jeremiah Healy

  I turned northeast at the Route 128 interchange, and then shortly thereafter took the exit for Route 114. After a mile and a half of suburban forks, I found the Christideses’ house.

  It was a small ranch on a quarter of an acre. I remembered when they bought it, to be their “starter” home. Back when her inability to conceive was thought to be a temporary aberration in an otherwise healthy woman. Then Eleni began to suspect that the infertility might be related to the occasional tremors she experienced in her legs. She nearly didn’t mention them to her doctor, “they was such a small thing.” After the tests and the retests came the confirmation. There was no relationship between the unsteadiness and the infertility, but the tremors were just the first signals of MS.

  I left the Fiat curbside, even though the driveway had been widened to simulate a parking area for the converted garage. The new office appeared makeshift from the outside, not exactly the kind of facade that would inspire confidence in the professional working behind it. Chris’s old sedan, a Pontiac that had two years on my coupe, slumped over the macadam abutting the space where the overhead door used to hang.

  I knocked on a human-size entrance and heard Chris’s voice say, “Yeah, come in.”

  The cramped reception area was paneled in bottom-of-the-line imitation pine that was already starting to yellow. I stepped around three molded plastic chairs of different colors and a low veneered coffee table with some ragged magazines. Chris stood at a desk that seemed secretarial but had no one behind it. He once told me that he was the first member of his family to go to college, much less law school. From what I remembered of his professional stature four years earlier, he was losing ground.

  “John, John! Jeez, it’s good to see you.”

  He hustled over to shake my hand, clutching and crushing a manila folder in his left fist. His curly black hair looked home-cut. Wearing a shirt whose collar points were a decade too long, he’d also put on thirty pounds that he didn’t carry well.

  “Chris, it’s been a while. How’s Eleni doing?”

  His broad, mobile face drooped. “The best she can. With the MS, sometimes it’s the muscles, other times the breathing or the voice. What can you do?”

  He began to walk backward toward a half-opened door. “Come on into my office so we can sit. I got a temp that was supposed to be here twenty minutes ago, but you and I gotta talk quick if we’re gonna be on time.”

  I figured he’d tell me for what.

  “Chris, I don’t do divorce cases.”

  “This isn’t like a divorce case.”

  “Chris, you’re representing this woman, right?”

  “Hanna. Her name’s Hanna Marsh.”

  “Hanna. And she’s got a five-year-old daughter?”

  “Right. Victoria. Vickie.”

  “And in an hour you’re supposed to be in Marblehead at the office of the attorney for Hanna’s husband to discuss things like custody, support, and division of property?”

  “Well, yeah, of course things like that, but—”

  “Chris, that sounds a hell of a lot like a divorce case to me.”

  Chris whoofed out a breath and held up both his hands. “Jeez, John, will you just let me tell it all the way out first?”

  “All right.”

  “Then you can make up your mind.”

  “I said all right. Go ahead.”

  “All right.” Chris collected himself, opened the file, then closed it again. “Aw, I don’t need the details to tell you the way it is. This Hanna, she and her husband live—lived, the husband’s still there—in Swampscott. She moved out on him and took the kid with her. Somehow she ends up at the doorstep of this woman that I represented some years back in her divorce but never charged.”

  “Never charged?”

  “Billed, billed. Never billed. I used to do a lot of kinda courtesy stuff for family and friends in the Greek community here and there, you know? You’re in solo practice, you gotta do those kinds of cases to get the better ones, the bigger ones later.”

  “Go on.”

  “Anyway, this former client’s got an apartment to rent, and I guess Hanna musta seen it in the paper. Hanna’s from Germany, met her husband when he was in the army over there, and she hasn’t got any relatives over here. Truth is, she ain’t got a pot to piss in, but Nerida—that’s my former client—she sees Hanna and the little kid and, well, she takes ’em in, cat and all.”

  “Cat?”

  “Yeah. The little kid, Vickie, she’s got a cat, kitten, whatever.”

  “I don’t see—”

  “So, Hanna and Vickie are in the crummy first floor of the three-family here while the husband, his name’s Roy, Roy Marsh, lives in a waterfront contemporary he had built over there in Swampscott.”

  “And you’re representing Hanna against him.”

  “We already established that.”

  “Chris, it still sounds like a divorce to me.”

  “Just wait, just wait a minute, okay?”

  I looked at him but didn’t talk.

  “You see, I don’t need you to do any investigating here. I mean, like assets or peephole stuff or like that. This guy Marsh is loaded, and I’ve got him dead to rights on at least one solid affair with a nurse who works Samaritan Hospital. This nurse, you wouldn’t believe it, is off Mondays and Tuesdays yet, perfect for screwing around, huh? Plus Hanna says he’s done God knows how many pickups, hookers even.”

  “You’ve got him financially and morally, where do I fit in?”

  Chris shifted his eyes down and away from me, fiddling with a ballpoint that had printing on its side, a giveaway advertisement from some bank. “He scares me, John.”

  I watched Chris until I realized I was making him uncomfortable. “What do you mean?”

  “Just that. You think it’s easy for me to say?” Chris squirmed in his chair, rubbing his left knee. His “civilian-preservation” knee, he called it senior year of college, the injury that kept him out of the draft’s chilly grasp. “The guy scares me.”

  “Has he done something?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Well, threatened you, what?”

  Chris glanced up at me, not liking this at all. “Nerida, this former client, she calls me and pours out Hanna’s sob story. Then Nerida calls Eleni, and tells her, and so Eleni nags at me till …” Chris gestured at the folder. “Look, I’m not complaining. This is a good case. Jeez, maybe a dream case, the guy’s earning power. But this Marsh, as soon as he hears I’m gonna represent his wife, he comes in here, to my office. Nobody out in reception that day, he comes in, stands in that doorway there, and just looks at me.”

  “Looks at you?”

  “Yeah, just looks at me. I know he was doing it before I looked up from what I was working on, because I could feel the guy staring down at me. Anyway, he looks at me, and when I ask him what he wants, he says, ‘I just wanted a look at you. I just wanted a look at the man who thinks he’s gonna take away everything I’ve worked for.’ He wasn’t yelling. Jeez, he didn’t even say it angry or nothing. Just low and even, like he was some gunslinger in a western. He stared and said that, and left. He didn’t even tell me his name, like automatically I’d know who he was.”

  “Did you?”

  “Did I?”

  “Did you know it was Roy Marsh?”

  “Oh, yeah, Hanna described him to me. She’s afraid of him, too. Along with everything else, it seems he was a little free with his hands.”

  “Can’t you get the court to order him not to bother you? Or Hanna?”

  “In a general sort of way, yeah. But we’re not at that stage yet.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Well, we haven’t filed for divorce yet, so there’s nothing for the court to order him on.”

  “Why don’t you file?”

  “There’s a thirty-day separation requirement, and Hanna only moved out a coupla weeks ago. I could go to court and get that waived, but in these things it’s usually
better over the long haul to avoid ruffling feathers.”

  “Meaning, don’t make the other side mad in the short run by having court orders against him?”

  “Right.”

  “And try to settle out of court first.”

  “Yeah. Well, kinda. See, if we can negotiate a fair settlement out of court, then we can put all the kinds of things I’d want the judge to order in our written agreement, and then we just pass it by the court at the final hearing.”

  “So everything looks like a consensus, not a command?”

  Chris beamed. “Couldn’t have put it better myself.”

  “Okay, let me get this straight. You’re afraid of Marsh, but you don’t want to tick him off by going to court first. So you want me to do exactly what?”

  “Come with me, with Hanna and me, to the settlement conference over to Roy’s lawyer.”

  “And do what?”

  “Nothing. Just sit there.”

  “Chris, you want a bodyguard.”

  He winced. “I wouldn’t call it that.”

  “I would. Why don’t you hire an off-duty cop?”

  “Because the coupla guys I know on the Peabody force would be out of their jurisdiction in Marblehead. And I don’t know anybody on their force.”

  “Then why not have the settlement conference here?”

  Chris slouched back in his chair, placing his palms behind his head and grinning. “Because, as a negotiating tactic, I let her persuade me to have it in Marblehead.”

  “Hanna?”

  “No, no. Felicia Arnold. She’s Roy’s attorney. Heard of her?”

  “No.”

  Chris closed his eyes and spoke blissfully. “She’s big-time, John. Used to do a lot of criminal defense work, then got religion and does world-class divorce stuff. It proves that this guy Marsh is the real thing, financially speaking.”

  I thought about Chris and how much this case probably meant to him and Eleni, “financially speaking.” I thought about how I had lost Beth, a day at a time over months, while Chris was losing Eleni, a day at a time over years. I had agreed to do dumber things for worse reasons.

  “Okay, I’m in.”

  Chris came forward, wringing his hands like a big winner about to rake in a poker pot. “Great, great.”

  “Are we meeting Hanna there?”

  “Naw, her car’s on the fritz, so I picked her up this morning. She and the kid are with Eleni. In the kitchen. C’mon.”

  As Chris grabbed his coat off the hook behind the door, I said, “By the way, what does this marauder do for a living?”

  Chris balked. “Marsh?”

  “Yeah, Marsh.”

  Chris turned away and began walking. “He sells insurance.”

  She looked worse than I could have imagined.

  Hanna Marsh stood up when Chris and I entered the kitchen. She rose a good inch taller than Chris, even in flat shoes. A sturdy figure that childbearing had made a little fleshy. She wore her platinum hair short enough to show dark roots if there had been any. A blond girl clutched the woman’s right leg at the knee with both arms, causing Hanna’s simple blue wool dress to bunch up. The child first buried her face in Hanna’s thigh, then looked up at me bright-eyed and said, “My name’s Vickie, and this is my mother.”

  I tried to manage a convincing smile at both of them, but Eleni’s appearance had shocked me. A doctor friend once told me that multiple sclerosis waxes and wanes. For Eleni, it looked like straight-line deterioration.

  I recalled her first with a cane, then metallic polio braces. Now the MS had shoved her into a wheelchair. The hands and arms looked normal, but whatever was left of her legs was hidden in folds of a long black skirt, and there was an intermittent twitch in one of the muscles in her left cheek, creating the bizarre impression of a woman caricaturing a flirtatious come-on. The hair had grayed unevenly and seemed dried and pulled. Had you seen her from the neck up, and without the twitch, you might have called her a striking woman of sixty. If I had my dates right, she’d just turned thirty.

  I looked for traces of the laughing, dancing woman of eighteen that Chris had introduced as his “arranged” fiancée. A black-haired, green-eyed immigrant whose independence wasn’t much tempered by an almost complete inability to speak English. She’d come to America to avoid the restrictions of the old ways on what women could do and what men could do to them, but the disease had bowed her in a way that millennia of tradition hadn’t.

  “John,” said Eleni.

  I leaned over and took her hand, kissing her lightly on the cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered into my ear.

  Chris said, “Although it’s pretty obvious, I guess, John Cuddy, Hanna Marsh.”

  “And me,” said Vickie.

  “And you,” I said, looking down at Vickie as I shook Hanna’s hand. It was dry, but trembling.

  “Mr. Cuddy,” said Hanna, her voice husky and catching, “I am sorry, but I want to thank you for coming with us today.”

  “Mrs. Marsh …”

  “Hey,” said Chris, “What’s with this Mr. and Mrs., huh? It’s John and Hanna, right?”

  “And Vickie,” I said, beating the child to it by just a bit, which seemed to please her.

  “Where are we going, anyway?” said Vickie.

  “Not you,” said Eleni, gracefully, “You and me stay here and make the files. Remember?”

  “Oh, right,” said Vickie. She looked up and beckoned me to squat down to her level. “John, when you and Mommie get back, I want you to meet Cottontail.”

  “Cottontail?”

  “Yes, she’s my little kitty and she’d like to play with you.”

  “She would, huh?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, we’ll see if we have time afterwards. Okay?”

  Vickie was crestfallen. “That’s what my daddy always says. ‘We’ll see.’ ”

  Chris said, “Hey, let’s get rolling here.” He moved to Eleni and bent down as if to kiss her, but I don’t think they made actual physical contact. “We’ll probably be there awhile, so be sure to give her lunch, huh?”

  “Don’t worry about us. Me and Vickie gonna be office people together. Right, Vickie?”

  “Right.”

  Making the files and office people together. As Chris, Hanna, and I walked out to his car, I wondered whether the temp-being-late line was the only white lie he’d fed me.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WE DROVE EAST ON Route 114, through the city of Salem, where witches were tried and burned, and past the state college. I rode in the backseat, listening to Chris and Hanna in the front. He was shooting disconnected questions rapidly; she was answering them as best she could. Based on what I knew about lawyer-client relations, most of the financial, custody, and even more personal topics Chris asked about should have been covered much earlier and without a third party like me present.

  Chris had scrawled some directions to Felicia Arnold’s office on a yellow legal pad, but once in downtown Marblehead itself, we got lost anyway. As Chris inched through the traffic patterns, the scenes out the windows supported my memories of Marblehead. One-way streets and narrow alleys, flanked by huge clapboard houses on postage-stamp lots.

  Once the home port of ship captains, the town was now headquarters for at least three distinct populations. One was the old-towners, enjoying substantial ancestral money and spectacular homes across the sheltered harbor on a spit of land called Marblehead Neck. The second group consisted of established, blue-collar families involved in commercial fishing or boat servicing. New-towners comprised the third population, mostly professionals who worked in Boston but had tired of city life and come to Marblehead to enjoy the sights and smells of a suburb on the sea. Word had it that some folks had done very well in the import business, specializing in a certain brown-green, vegetablelike substitute for tobacco.

  Chris finally found Arnold’s address, a beautifully restored two-story mansion on a high hill overlooking the harbor. Outside the car, the sea br
eeze lifted the high, metallic singsong of the masts and stays of thousands of pleasure sailers moored below us. At an average length of twenty-four feet and an average cost of $15,000, there was probably more seaworthiness there than we lost at Pearl Harbor.

  A receptionist greeted us inside the heavy brass-knockered front door and led us upstairs. I was last in line, and as I reached the top of the steps, I saw off in a desk area to my right a svelte woman, fortyish with auburn hair clipped in a not-quite-punk style. She arched an eyebrow and smiled at me. A younger, lawyer-like man with tinted eyeglasses and a beard appeared beside her. She said something to him out of the side of her mouth while she watched me. I had the distinct feeling of being inspected and assessed as her smile became a smirk. The young man glared at me and turned away from her.

  “Sir?” said the receptionist at my left.

  “Yes?”

  “The conference room is this way.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  She showed me into a lushly carpeted arena with a glass-walled vista of sails so bright I had to squint. Chris and Hanna were already seated. Chris had both hands in his battered briefcase, coaxing a slim file past a bulging one. Hanna fidgeted next to him.

  The receptionist said, “Ms. Arnold will be with you shortly” and closed the door.

  Chris slapped a form in front of Hanna that had a slew of dollar figures in pencil, some of them with question marks and others crossed out and rewritten. “This is your financial statement.”

  Hanna’s mind took a moment to click in. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “Your financial statement. Weekly expenses and stuff you need like we talked about on the phone. It’s just a draft, but we’ll be using it today and you gotta make sure it’s accurate.”

  Chris turned back to his file, madly flipping through it for something. Any fool could see that Hanna, who spent all of five seconds on the financial statement, was in no shape to verify anything, especially without her checkbook and bills for comparison. I also couldn’t believe that Chris intended to show an opponent the uncertainties the hand-scratched form suggested about Hanna’s, and Vickie’s, needs.